Deicide
by Lady Serpentine
Summary: Bellatrix cannot evade the rules of war. Often, she does not want to - not when it comes to revenge. Post OotP, includes Severus, Lucius, and Order Members in turn.
1. prologue

PROLOGUE

This is how it works.

You kill one of us, then we kill one of you. Balance. Perfect balance. How can the fight be fair if there is no equality among the ranks?

We have honour. You know this. We have honour you do not understand, do not accept, yet you know we have it. But we do not need you to accept and we do not need you to understand; you must only know the calculations. Kill one of us and we kill one of you.

Of course, numbers may vary. Some are worth more than others; simple as that. We do not count in lives but we count in worth. We count the real way, the proper way. We add and we tally and we divide and subtract. We are mathematicians, and we are murderers.

If we kill one of you, it is acceptable for you to kill one of us. This is the natural way of things. Sometimes you may never reach our ranks; sometimes we cannot avenge our own loss. It is fifty-fifty, and everyone gets to roll the dice.

But do not underestimate us.

You may kill us if we kill you; you may create the balance if you can. We may evade you; we may tip the scales if we can.

But if you attack first, then we will attack next.

Choose your targets carefully. Study them, research them. Know your enemy. Know what you will face if you kill one of us; be prepared once you begin to thin our ranks.

Do not kill the wrong man.

Do not kill my husband.


	2. i

**First of, let it be known that this story comes from… nowhere. It just came and hit me in the head. The concept, I mean. Later ideas – various plot points, the involvement of several characters, and so on – were created over time.**

**This story will focus on Bellatrix and Severus, as it is with another story-in-progress of mine (Dead Letter) but, joy of all joys, Lucius Malfoy will also have a main role, along with countless others.**

**Story copyrights are the usual… ideas are mine, views on characters are half mine, characters and universe itself is JKR's. Hurrah, JK.**

**Story will include violence. Hell, that's the whole reason for the plot.**

I

The car was hot and sticky because the air conditioner was not on. Before her imprisonment she had never been one for cars, but she had finally forced herself to drive after all those years, goaded on by the ease, the quickness of it all. Muggles could track cars. But wizards couldn't.

The fake id and license was in her jean pocket, made for her especially.

The window was rolled down. She could hear the noise of the cars outside the alleyway sweeping by, feel the stray breeze flicking strands of hair into her eyes. She put on her sunglasses and relaxed against the hot plastic seat. Fake leather; pleather. Clung to the skin, ripped itself away with the force of a snapped rubber band.

She was ageless. She was not young but she wasn't old, either; her face was unlined but her eyes were ravaged, her body was thin and elegant but no longer spry. Her age was impossible to guess. The id said she was thirty-five; but the id was fake.

Bellatrix closed her eyes and all she could see was shadow. She opened them again, checked her watch, turned up the radio, relaxed again. The sun through the open window was beginning to burn the pale skin uncovered by the tank top. It glinted off her wedding ring.

She checked her watch again, and then the rear-view mirror.

There was a face in it. A man was walking down the alleyway behind her. He wore black, even though it was summer, and his long coat seemed to shimmer in the heat haze.

She waited for him to come closer. He did.

He opened the passenger door and got in, shutting it firmly. He took off his sunglasses, and his eyes were black.

She looked at him. He was tall, and thin, and crow-like; his nose was savagely hooked, his skin milky white, and his hair was shoulder-length and greasy-looking.

"Hello, Bella," he said.

She turned the radio down. The cars were still sweeping past on the street. The alleyway was a haven, away from prying eyes. But Bella doubted the Muggles would see her even if they were looking right at her. "Hi." she said.

He looked uncomfortable. "I shouldn't be here," he stated.

Bellatrix shrugged. He was here. That was the end of the matter.

The man, whose name was Severus, took out a pack of cigarettes from his coat, and offered them to her. She waved it away, and felt a mix of revulsion and longing as she watched him light one and take a draw, tapping the ash out of the window and onto the pavement.

"You still smoke?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

Severus chuckled. Silly question, Bellatrix realised; his voice was smooth and silky, and smoking would have destroyed that over the past twenty years. "Rarely," he said, blowing a ring of smoke out the window. "Only when I am nervous."

"Ah."

"You quit, I take it. Good for you."

"I couldn't really get them in Azkaban, Severus," Bellatrix muttered, flexing her fingers on the steering wheel. She'd been at two packs a day before they'd sentenced her.

He inclined his head to her in a somewhat gentlemanly manner. "True."

Severus was not rich. Not exactly. He was well enough on his own, though his family background had been less than stellar. The family had only the blood and the name to call its own - and a crumbling manor in Scotland.

But he was classy. He was dignified. At least, when he wanted to. Usually he was sweeping and dramatic and unpleasant, but when he was around her he was calm, and he was quiet, and he was amused. He was different from the boy she had known; he was older, an adult, and he had suffered.

"So why'd you come," Bella said after a moment of silence, where she could hear the tinny sound of the turned down radio, "if you knew you'd be in shit if you got caught?"

"You are blunt," Severus said. "I've always liked that."

She shrugged.

"I came," Severus said, "to pay my condolences."

"Ah."

"Yes."

"I see."

"Indeed."

"Severus," Bellatrix said, "you can shove it up your ass."

"I thought you'd say that," Severus said. He flicked the cigarette butt out the window and reached into his coat pocket again, and instead of cigarettes he pulled out a worn piece of paper.

"I know I am no longer on your side," Severus said, speaking low, "but I do love you and I always have. You were a sister and an ally when no one else was. I will not interfere, Bella."

She stared at him. "Interfere with what?"

Severus smiled tightly, and put the folded paper on the dashboard. "Good luck," he said.

"I never saw you," she replied.

He got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked away.

x

The paper said, _Kinglsey Shacklebolt_.

x

Bellatrix grit her teeth.

x

She did not know if he had died fighting.

All she knew was that he was dead. The Dark Lord refused to talk about it, but it wasn't like she had asked.

They cremated him, and his ashes were stored in the family vault. Bella spent the next two days after the burning in his bedroom, lying on his bed, inhaling the old smell of him from his pillows, still there after all those years.

She had loved him very much and nobody was quite sure why.

x

Voldemort was tapping his pen impatiently against the kitchen tabletop, a little fold between his eyebrows. The coffee at his elbow was cold. That was fine, since he hadn't touched it once since it was made at nine in the morning.

Bellatrix entered in a fury, tossing her coat onto a chair. The keys to her car fell out of the pocket and clattered to the floor the same time she took the untouched coffee and tossed it into the sink.

"I'm sorry," she said immediately, setting the cup on the counter and moving to collect her keys.

"For what?" he asked, and scratched something out on the notebook in front of him.

"The keys," Bella said, putting them back in the coat pocket, "and being late."

"There is nothing to be late for," Voldemort said. He was tall, and thin - not a sickly thinness, but more a thinness that came of energy. Voldemort burnt so much of himself up each day that it was almost as if his body was unable to catch up at times. The irises of his eyes were scarlet and slit like a cat's, and he had the hands of a pianist. "The keys interrupted nothing. So you are forgiven."

"Ah." Bella said.

The house was an old house. No luxury, just some comforts. That was all a base of operations needed. Once you got the marble floors and the gold bathrooms and the imported spring water disaster came down on your head like a big flaming piece of shit. Bellatrix knew this. Almost all the Death Eaters knew this. This was why Voldemort chose a somewhat shabby house in a somewhat shabby neighbourhood with regular tap water as his base of operations. He was respected for it.

Besides, if your leader couldn't abide a little dirt now and then, what use was he?

Bellatrix said, "I'll be upstairs."

Voldemort shrugged, which meant that she could go. Her eyes lingered on his hair, long and black and soft like a baby's, before leaving the kitchen, going down the hallway, and taking the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

Bellatrix went into her room. She was one of the few Death Eaters that lived in residence - everyone else was in Azkaban or in their own homes. She closed the door behind her, and instead of turning on the lights opened the curtains.

The streetlamps burned outside, bright and yellow. She opened the window to let in the balmy summer air and leaned out to take in the night.

Behind her, her bed was empty.

She took the note Severus had given her out of her pocket. She went to her desk and rummaged through the shelves for a tack. Then she pinned the paper to the wall above her bed.

_Kingsley Shacklebolt_, it read in the yellow glow of the streetlamps.

She stared at it for a long time. Then she went to bed, not bothering to close the window.

x

"Smoking, eh, Snape?" Moody said in his growling sort of voice, leaning over the table at Number 12 Grimmauld Place.

Severus snapped his lighter shut and pocketed it. "Your ability to point out the obvious is astonishing."

"Ah, Snape," Moody chuckled, "sometimes it is the obvious that people refuse to see, and it can make all the difference in life. You only smoke when you're nervous, see."

Severus' expression, one of mild scorn, didn't waver.

"So why're you nervous, Snape?" Moody pursued conversationally. He was mocking Severus; he always tended to do that, because while Moody trusted few people Severus had to be near the bottom of the list, which was quite an achievement. "Anything particular?"

Severus' lips twisted into a bit of a smirk. "What if I sad you were making me nervous?" he replied, in the same conversational tone that wasn't conversational at all.

"I knew you'd be lying," Moody replied. His normal eye and his magical glass eye were both fixed on Severus, which unnerved people more than it did when the glass eye was continually moving around. "Because I don't make you nervous."

Severus tapped ash onto the tabletop and didn't answer.

"It's the trials, isn't it," Moody said, frankly, as a statement rather than a question. "I know for a fact it is. Well, Snape. I don't give a damn how you feel about them, but I know they were your friends, and I know that you might be thinking about lying at the trials. Don't even think about it."

"Moody," Severus said, "go fuck yourself."

"Severus," Molly Weasley snapped from the doorway, "Please, kindly do not smoke in this house, and be a bit more civilised, won't you? I have children in residence."

"Gladly, Molly," Severus said. He stood up and left, leaving a grimly smiling Moody and a thin trail of cigarette smoke behind him.


	3. ii

II

In her dreams he died all over again.

And again.


	4. iii

Pyrites is a character JKR edited out of the books. So far, at least. So I decided to use him – look, free Death Eater fodder!

III

The Daily Prophet wrote of Rodolphus Lestrange's death quite righteously. 'Justice is Served' , the article was called. _One of the perpetrators responsible for the incapacitation of beloved aurors Frank and Alice Longbottom is dead_…

x

There is a science to killing a god.

There are steps one must take. There are dark places one must pass through. There are directions to be taken, rules to follow - rules to break.

x

Bellatrix woke up slowly. She felt like vomiting and her throat was sore. There was sunlight, golden and yellow, across half of her blankets. The window was still open. In a wooden chair beside the bed Lord Voldemort was sitting, his chin propped in his hand, watching her.

"This must be hard for you," he said. "But I would not know."

Bellatrix rose one shoulder in a shrug, as best she could while she was lying on her side.

"Do not lay in bed all day; I am sure you have work to do."

She nodded. Sunlight shone along the edge of his black hair. His eyes were still red. His face would change over time, but his eyes always stayed red.

He took her hand, and placed it on the bedside table. It touched something smooth and cold; a glass of water.

"Get up," he said again. He stood up, picked up the chair, and set it back against the wall, by the closet. Then he walked out of the room, leaving her on her own with the water he had brought up for her.

Bellatrix hauled herself upright. She had a headache; she wanted aspirin. Instead she drank the water, and it was cold and clear, and settled her rolling stomach somewhat.

He was right. The Dark Lord was always right.

She got up out of bed, and she stripped off the jeans she had fallen asleep in. She rubbed a little at the marks on her skin the seams had caused overnight, then rummaged in her closet and pulled on a pair of black pinstriped trousers over her thighs. They hung on her bony hips. She was far too thin.

She belted them tightly on. Then she loosened the belt a little, lest it cut into her skin. She didn't bother to change her shirt, just went and sat at her desk and went through the drawers, looking.

She got out some paper and a pencil. She wrote down, 'Kingsley Shacklebolt.' She added, for good measure, 'auror.' And then, 'Order of the Phoenix.'

She chewed on her eraser, then decided she was hungry. She got up, and she went downstairs. She wondered vaguely where Peter was. She did not like Peter.

x

Severus was bent over the toilet, retching.

"You alright?" Nymphadora Tonks asked, drumming her heels against the wooden cabinets. Her hair was a shock of pink and orange and yellow, as if she'd dipped her head into the tropics. She had several piercings on her face.

"No," Severus said. He spat and wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm. "What are you doing here?"

"Just felt like visiting," Tonks said. She stopped drumming her heels and said. "Have you slept?"

"Tonks," Severus said, getting carefully to his feet, "You are my goddaughter, not my mother. Move, I need to use the sink."

Severus was someone Tonks truly admired - because even when he was vomiting and sickened and fragile, he still managed to give off a feeling of control, or at least irritation and demand. She got off the counter and let him rinse his mouth out at the sink.

"You should be at work," Severus said, after a moment.

"I have the day off," Tonks said. Then, "You smell like cigarette smoke."

Severus gave her a deadpan sort of look. "I need to go to sleep," he said, and matter-of-factly went to his bedroom. She heard him get into bed.

Tonks ventured out of the bathroom. Her godfather was indeed in bed, passed out, apparently. She frowned and went downstairs and drank a carton of milk at the kitchen table, thinking.

x

Bellatrix dropped a glass of water.

She couldn't help it. Suddenly, her muscles had gone insane, tensing and flexing and jittering, forcefully wresting themselves from her control. Shards of glass and droplets of water jumped out in every direction in a miniature explosion; she squeezed her eyes shut and winced at the noise, recoiling somewhat but not moving from her spot.

She opened her eyes after ten seconds; she knew because she counted. The glass and water sparkled in the morning sunlight.

There was a rustle of thin, flimsy paper and Voldemort turned the page to his newspaper, looking in slight interest for the crossword. He said nothing.

There was another man at the kitchen table, and he was sitting in Bella's spot. He was an attractive man, a dandyish man, with white gloves and red-gold hair. His name was Pyrites.

"You ought to clean that up, Bella," he said, smiling, as if it was alright to use her shortened name, as if he had known her for years and years, as if she liked him.

Bellatrix didn't say anything, just stared mutely at him.

The newspaper rustled again; Voldemort had set it down flat on the table.

"Go get a rag, Bella," he said.

She could move - she could move for him. She went back to the sink, and looked around, and she found a rag on the counter.

Voldemort looked round at Pyrites. "Leave." he said.

Pyrites stared. Then he got up and left, leaving his white gloves on the kitchen table.

"Bellatrix," Voldemort said. She twisted the rag nervously in her hands. "You are apologizing far too much of late. I want you to stop. I know you feel sorrow for whatever you do that may offend me, but apologizing takes time and you do not have much time. When you do something wrong, go and fix it."

"Yes, master," Bella said, nodding a little.

"Clean it up."

Wordlessly, she gathered up most of the glass in the rag, and mopped up the water. Then, using her fingers, she plucked up the rest.

Voldemort went back to looking for the crossword, and solving it.

Bella sat at the table beside him and ate a piece of toast with strawberry jam and then went back into her room. Pyrites didn't come back into the kitchen in all that time, because he knew he wouldn't be welcome.

x

"She's going to want blood," Moody said.

Arthur Weasley ran a hand across his grey face. He could hear his children upstairs, here for the afternoon, arguing over something trivial - some pathetic slight that only children found important. But adults did it too; even in war. Adults made mistakes.

"She is," he agreed.

x

It was a relatively small room, but then again, it was a holding cell, and not built for comfort. There were two aurors guarding the door, every minute of every day. Sometimes, they would stare at the prisoner; most of the time they played cards.

Their prisoner did not mind.

He was not Malfoy, he was not Lucius, he was not Mr Malfoy. He was Lucius Malfoy - it was a cold name, a sterile name, a rusted name. Lucius was too personal; Malfoy was impersonal but too popular; too respected. He was going to be the burr on the otherwise exalted family line. The name Mr Malfoy suggested respect, which he did not have.

So they called him Lucius Malfoy. Nothing more.

He was born of luxury, and some thought he was luxury himself. Now he was a poetic figure of power gone wrong, of the results when humanity met with greed and wealth and fame.

He didn't care.

His trial was to be in two days.

He knew his son would not be coming.

x

The last thing that Bellatrix was going to do was use magic.

x

The last place Lucius Malfoy intended to go was Azkaban.

x

By the first strike of the midnight hour, something was going to happen.

x

Voldemort was a patient man. He was also a smart man. He spent his days inside his own head, and yet, somehow, seemed to be aware of everything - every thought, feeling, detail, event - that went on around him.

He was very aware that Bellatrix was angry, and upset. He knew she was vicious and violent and not afraid, _never _afraid.

He knew she'd have to figure everything out on her own.


	5. iv

IV

Bellatrix started her car. The seats were blisteringly hot, and burned her shoulders. She rubbed at them as she turned the radio up and it pounded on her ears.

Her mouth twisted a little.

Kingsley Shacklebolt, the paper had said. She had checked her sources, looked through old files. Auror. He graduated two years after she did. Ravenclaw. He was clever.

Did he kill on someone else's orders, or on his own whims? Did he actually do the killing, or was he merely just randomly involved? The trouble was that the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters were, in several ways, almost leaderless. Often, they did what they thought would be best for their respective organisations without consulting other members, since there was usually an eighty percent chance that it was the right thing to do and wouldn't foil any larger than life plans their leaders had carefully crafted. Not only that, but if there _had _been an order for Rodolphus Lestrange's death, then that order would have probably spanned over several people - a sort of chain. It happened within the Death Eaters, and it happened within the Order. A mixture of chaos and stability - just the right edge to make both groups dangerous.

Bellatrix was one of the worst when it came to both of these organisations. Bellatrix did what Voldemort told her to do. But Bellatrix also had the ability to do whatever she wanted without being told, because usually that was what Voldemort wanted her to do. She had free range.

And he supported her.

That was all she needed.

She gripped her steering wheel.

It was too hot out. Summer. She bit her lip and tasted blood. She parked somewhere downtown, she didn't know where, and got out onto the pavement, and walked around within the crowd. She needed money. She needed a new persona, or several - she had no intention of hiding her identity from the Order of the Phoenix, at least not fully. She wanted a disguise, to get her into the right places, to get the right equipment.

She would have to start at the bottom, and work her way up. She would go to her sources, and then use that to go higher, and higher.

She got back into her car, and sat in it for a long time, thinking. Then she bought a packet of toffee candy, and went back to headquarters, driving like a bat out of hell, if that bat owned a car.

x

"My lord," she cried, bursting into the kitchen. But Lord Voldemort wasn't there. She found him in the backyard, stretched out on his back in his dark clothing. An abundance of electrical tape was the only thing that stopped his shoes from falling apart.

"What?" he asked, his eyes closed.

"My lord," Bella said, kneeling down on the grass beside him. It looked prickly. "How do you change your face?"

"There is more than one way," Voldemort said. His eyelashes were long and dark and his hair was short and shaggy. He looked young, she thought. Very young. How old was he? Did it matter? "There is physical changing, but there is also altering the perceptions of those around you."

He opened one scarlet eye and looked at her. "I have never used the latter on you."

Bellatrix asked, "Why not?"

"Because it would not work." Both eyes were back to being closed. "You are too clever. I suggest physical changes above perception altering, were I you, if you plan on looking face-to-face with someone. Perception is usually only a guarantee in crowds."

"Will you teach me?"

"No."

Bellatrix's shoulders slumped. "Please?" she whispered.

Voldemort sat up. There was grass in his hair, and stuck to his back. "Alright."

As they went back inside, Bella asked, "What were you doing?"

Voldemort paused, and looked over his shoulder at the yellowed lawn. "Just thinking," he said.

x

She could time this perfectly. She could.

x

"Too much sun can do things to your head," Pyrites said to the mirror, his eyes tired and weary. "It can make you think you're strong, when you're not."

"Too true," his reflection said.

x

"Why are you still here?"

Tonks looked up from her game of solitaire on the table. Severus was leaning against the frame of the doorway, his black hair glistening in the afternoon sun.

"Didn't feel like leaving," she said, vaguely. She gathered up her cards. Quickly, snakelike, she began to shuffle them. "Poker?"

"Not in the gambling mood," Severus said.

"There's something wrong with you," Tonks said, looking shrewd. Her hair was blue; she had changed it while Severus was sleeping. "Granted, there's always something wrong with you. There's always been something off. Mother says you've been like that since you were little. But it's something different this time. I wish I knew what it was."

Severus sat at the table. He scratched the back of his neck. She could see the skull and snake design upon his arm, inked out in red, like blood. She didn't know how it was put there. No Death Eater, traitor or otherwise, could tell the Ministry of Magic how they received the Dark Mark. They could never remember.

"You're very perceptive," he said.

"I know," Tonks said, dryly.

"I suggest you stop it," he said, "before it gets you killed."

"Nah," Tonks said, setting the cards aside. "I can either live life and die young knowing things, or waste life and die old not knowing things. There's no fun in that."

"Life isn't supposed to be fun."

"Life isn't supposed to be anything," Tonks said.

Severus looked at her. "Do you want to know who you sound like?"

The corner of Tonks' lips quirked upwards. "Yes, I do."

"No," Severus said, digging in his pocket, "you don't."

He set a matchbox on the table. Tonks stared at it. They were silent for a moment.

"It's a matchbox." she said.

"Your stupidity knows no bounds," Severus said, testily. "Look inside it."

Tonks picked it up. There was a slight clunk within. She opened it.

She looked inside.

"I can't take this," she said, quietly.

"Yes, you can," Severus said. "And you will. Now excuse me, I have business to attend to." And he got up and stalked out of the house. She said nothing to dissuade him.

x

She sounded like her aunt, before her aunt went mad.

x

Lucius Malfoy was to be held at trial in two days, on July the eighteenth.

But a lot of things could happen in two days.

x

Peter was carefully going through files in the kitchen. He looked up only twice. The first when Bellatrix had peeked in, seeking Voldemort, and then when Bellatrix and Voldemort passed through - Bellatrix gave him a pained look, and Voldemort seemed very interested in the ceiling - but other than that his attention was centred on the papers.

He'd just started a half hour back, but already the type was beginning to blur before his eyes. He sighed, and looked at them again.

He read:

_P. I. Weasley._

_Large source of information. Weak-willed. Gryffindor, therefore brave, but ambitious. Best bet is to trick into becoming loyal. Wealth of information. Protected little. Slender built, almost fragile, 5'9, slightly nearsighted. Intelligent and righteous, believes certain sources above others, workaholic. Normal working hours 8 am to 8 pm. Lunch break 11 am to 11:30 am, but usually never takes them. Red hair, brown eyes, somewhat haughty. Family within OotP._

_Breakable (?). Location still unknown. _

Peter sighed. "Good enough," he said to himself, shifting the sheet aside to the small pile at his elbow. Bellatrix did not like him, and truthfully, he didn't really like Bellatrix. But she was violent, and she frightened him - sometimes more than Voldemort, who was at least semi-predictable - and Peter wasn't stupid.

Bella would want as much information as possible.

Peter would help her get it.

x

Voldemort radiated warmth from his time in the sun, even more so in the shadowy confines of the house. It clung to his black jeans and mangy black shirt and even his hair. He smelt sweetly of dried grass. There was still some in his hair, in fact.

He was chewing on one of the toffee candies Bellatrix had purchased. He was forever consuming sugar - it gave him quick energy, and sated his sweet tooth.

He was back at the kitchen table, and he was sharpening a knife that he planned to use on her.

Bellatrix sat beside him, drinking lemonade. Across from her, Peter was carefully going through a pile of papers.

"What are you doing?" she asked, bluntly.

"He's doing something nice for you," Voldemort said, a sickly smile playing about the corners of his mouth. "So be nice to him, Bella."

Peter raised his eyebrows somewhat, but didn't respond to the remark.

Bellatrix stirred her drink with her finger. The ice cubes clicked loudly against the glass. "Are those our files?"

"Yes," Peter said. "I'm separating out potential sources for you."

"Oh." Bellatrix said. She looked somewhat surprised.

Sometimes, it was hard to hate his fellow Death Eaters. Peter was confused by it. He knew they were horrid, and they had made him do things that made him horrid as well - but there was an underlying sadness to some of the Death Eaters that Peter couldn't explain. Like Bella.

His journey into the centre of the Death Eaters was a long story that Peter didn't care to think over.

"You're welcome," Peter said.

"Oh," Bella said, startled out of some inner reverie. She smiled in a quirky, girlish way. "Thank you, Peter."


	6. v

**character death.**

V

The cuts were fresh, and stung.

"It will go away," Voldemort had said.

When she shifted her jaw, she could feel the cuts on her cheek stretch a little. The same applied to her back, arms, and legs whenever she moved.

She was still skinny, but it was different now - she was skinny like she had done it on purpose, like she had starved and vomited herself empty to attain the hollow stomach and the ribs that stuck out like bony fingers. Her hair was light brown and shining and wavy, and she tossed her head a lot to show said hair off.

Her face was different. Everything was.

She had gone to empty out her vault. The goblins at the bank barely asked questions - if you showed up with the key, then that was that. She looked like she was a ministry official, out to empty out the funds from the account of Bellatrix Black. That was all. Nothing wrong with that.

Even though, if there had been something slightly off, the goblins wouldn't have concerned themselves with it. They were indifferent; it was useful.

Bella dared not touch the Lestrange funds. That was Rodolphus' money. It was his inheritance. Bella knew she was being foolish in refusing to take that money as well, but she couldn't help it. She wasn't a Lestrange by blood. Besides, Rabastan - if he ever got out - might need a little extra money.

The key was warm in her back pocket.

x

Heat can indeed do strange things to your head.

Heat can make someone feel strong, especially after a long, cold winter. Heat can make you feel weak, as well - it can burn at you, squeeze at your insides, drag its teeth down your spine. Heat can speed things up, but it can slow things down. Heat can make time become nonexistent, and heat will make it slow to a crawl just to frustrate you.

Heat was insanity. The cold was insanity as well, but everything was different when it was cold. Heat was strange. Heat could drive you mad.

x

Bellatrix had gone shopping.

She'd taken some gold and exchanged it to muggle currency, and then she had had to buy things. Clothes, of course - good quality, durable clothing, clothing she could _do _things in. Several types of shoes, several hats, gloves, anything - different outfits for different personas.

And of course there was everything else.

All she'd had to do was ask and Voldemort had told her - how to get weapons in London, how to get into the underbelly and the black market. And besides all of that there were a few standard items she could pick up anywhere and use to her advantage.

There were shopping bags in her back seat, but in the trunk there was a cricket bat, a sledgehammer, a machete; throwing knives and daggers and ice picks and chisels. There were also a few guns, the names and styles of which she did not know - but the dealer, a very nice chap indeed, had been quite helpful in teaching her how to load, reload, aim, fire, and keep everything in good condition. Of course, he also enjoyed getting his hands all over her in the teaching process, but Bella figured that since he was the sort of person with a short lifespan, he might as well get a few thrills in before someone ripped his face off.

She was back at headquarters again. Bella decided that she loved her car very, very much. It was going to help her do everything. She got out and began to lug all of her things in, minus the menagerie in her trunk. She wordlessly made several trips up and down the stairs with her bags, and then locked her car, went back into her room, and began to get dressed.

x

When it came to the war, Voldemort arranged everything into chains.

Certain events would be strung together, and then Voldemort would use the prior information to attempt to visualise what was most likely to happen. He linked the chains together into a web, and every minute of every day when something of import happened he would collapse these chains and put them back together.

That was what he had been doing in the backyard when Bella had interrupted him.

But that was fine, as the current chain of the greatest importance involved Bellatrix.

Bellatrix was very important to him. She wasn't like Lucius, who did what he knew needed to be done, but never what he felt.

Bella lived in constant danger since she was _driven _- not by her head but by her heart.

She was very valuable.

She never questioned Voldemort. Never. She trusted him, she loved him, and when he said something she never raised her eyebrows at it. Bellatrix was the person who always believed Voldemort's lies - so much, in fact, that he found it difficult to deceive to her.

He didn't want to destroy something so rare.

Bellatrix was powerful, and she was very skilled, and she was moved by what she felt needed to be done. She was so wonderfully volatile that she would finally be the one to help Voldemort accomplish all he needed to for this war - pure chaos among his enemies.

A death in any of the rival organisations caused a stir. But Bella would not stop at one death. Bella would knock off as many she could.

She had the feeling behind her. And Voldemort had taught her well. He had helped her master spells, had helped her dive into the Dark Arts - had watched her somewhat childish fingers, delicately tracing symbols of magic in the air, shape into the long fingers of a tall, beautiful woman of brute force. She was a terrible, frightening weapon, and she was his.

Voldemort was carefully rearranging the chains in his head. Every single one of them was probable, and important. But most of them, thanks to Bellatrix, were about to take second place.

Voldemort went out to enjoy the sun again, and to think.

And he thought, what a beautiful day it was today.

x

Bellatrix's new wardrobe consisted mostly of black - part of it was style, part of it was stealth, and part of it was the fact she was in mourning. It was only right, she decided.

She put on thick, heavy black jeans, a black sleeveless shirt, and a black turtleneck sweater. She took off her gold wedding band, because with gloves on it would be a hindrance and with gloves off it would be a clue to her identity. That's what she told herself, even though she knew she would soon reveal her identity anyway to make her point. Truthfully, she found it somewhat disgusting to dirty the ring her husband had given her with his murderers' blood.

She wasn't worried about getting too hot in her clothes since she would be working indoors and at night. Besides that there were dozens of mysterious, dark-haired women in the city, and she wanted to blend in. All the normal, sundress-wearing girls were suspect when night fell.

She had on heavy-duty work boots, which would be loud, but she didn't need stealth. She wasn't sneaking in - she was charging in, bold as brass.

She had her gloves on, and a few knives strapped to her wrists and ankles, and her hair was in a bun, out of her face. She had stuck her wand in a sheath she had bought in Diagon Alley and had strapped it to her waist, under her sweater.

She checked her watch. Seven thirty.

She went downstairs, and into the kitchen. She'd have to eat before she left.

Voldemort was there, like usual, consuming massive amounts of rice and soy sauce. There was still some grass in his hair. Peter was there as well, but he wasn't eating.

"Do you have our file on Kingsley Shacklebolt in there?" She asked, and pointed at the small stack at Peter's elbow. He licked his thumb, separated it from the other sheets, and handed it to her.

She folded it up and stuck it in her back pocket. "This is all I need for now," she said. "I'll come back tonight for the rest."

"Eat something before you go," Voldemort said.

Voldemort was forever eating. He had once told Bellatrix that he had been hungry for most of his life, ever since he'd started practicing magic. Magic did something to him, burned away at him until he was slim and brittle looking and pale as a ghost.

Bellatrix sat down beside him, and took comfort in his presence. When she stood up to leave after not eating anything, he said nothing to dissuade her.

x

It was nearing sundown when Bellatrix stopped her car in front of Kingsley Shacklebolt's house. She hoped he was home.

She got out of the car and went around to the trunk, and opened it. She looked around, making certain she was alone. Then she took a black duffel bag and put some rope in it and a few other things as well, but she doubted she'd need them. Then she took up the cricket bat, and went up to the front door.

She set the bag down on the step behind her, made sure it and the bat were out of immediate sight, and knocked.

She waited for the door to crack open several inches.

Then she shoved the tip of the cricket bat into the crack, levered it open all the way and slammed her shoulder to the door, forcing herself in. She had been wearing her fake face again, just to make sure Kinglsey opened the door for her, but once she was indoors she let it drop back to her real face, the face of an escaped Death Eater.

Kingsley was a very competent man. This was why Bella wasted no time. She simultaneously kicked him in the shin and swung the bat in the air, feeling a rush of satisfaction when she felt it connect with the man's head.

She watched him tumble to the ground, halfway between reaching for his wand. She took the wand and threw it away, still unsure as to whether she should break it sometime. She retrieved her bag and closed the door behind her after making sure no one on the street had seen her enter. Then she cocked her head and listened.

No one else in the house. Good. She hurried upstairs to check, and then back downstairs, giving the house a once over, checking for escape exits. She locked the front door after some debate, figuring that it was better to be trapped inside than to have any of Kingsley's friends let themselves in.

She rolled him into the nearest room - the living room, it turned out to be - and, after fetching a chair from the kitchen, proceeded to tie him to it using the coil of rope she had brought with her.

Then she took another chair, set it in front of the unconscious Shacklebolt, and sat down. She set the cricket bat on her lap and the duffel bag on the floor behind her.

Then she waited.

And while she waited, she was thinking.

She thought, this man had a hand in her husband's murder. She also thought that Kingsley Shacklebolt was a very strong, stubborn individual, and she was unlikely to get any information out of him. He was too noble, too righteous - he'd die for a cause.

She couldn't hate him for it because she was the exact same way.

Bella was a hypocrite most of the time, but only when she wasn't aware of it.

She bit her lip and closed her eyes for a long time. When she opened them Kingsley Shacklebolt was awake. His eyes were very piercing, which she did not like.

"Lestrange," he said.

Bellatrix smiled, painfully. She jigged her knee a little. "Hello." She said.

He said nothing more.

Bellatrix cast around for something to say. Lucius was the one who was good at these things, not her. Lucius was the one who could do some of the most amazing things with words, could wring secrets out of someone like water from a sponge. Alas, he wasn't here. She'd have to do this on her own.

"So, did you kill my husband?" She asked, bluntly. She still wasn't sure. And surely Kingsley knew he would die or become captured, and so surely he'd answer her this simple question, since it really was of no importance.

He said nothing.

Which meant he didn't kill Rodolphus. Someone else had. If he had, then Kingsley would have told her, so she would fly into a rage and kill him and not milk him for information as to who had done the actual murder.

He didn't think Bellatrix would know this. He wasn't aware that Bella would have done the same thing in such a situation, and so he wasn't aware that he should have lied to her rather than keep his silence. And she doubted he'd have thought that far ahead and was saying nothing to trick her, or something like that.

Everyone knew Bella was mad, even Bella herself. But they thought that that meant she was stupid. But she was not.

They knew she was a tool but didn't know she was a thinking one.

"Alright." Bellatrix said. "So someone else did, I gather?"

Still, nothing.

Bellatrix was becoming mildly worried. She needed information. If she got nothing out of Shacklebolt, then she was lost. She rubbed her chin nervously.

And she realised that she really missed her husband.

And this man had had a hand in his death.

And she could get information elsewhere, after all.

She made a decision.

Bellatrix leaned forward a little. She was frowning.

"My husband is dead," she said, frankly. "And I miss him very much. I know what you are - you are an auror, a Dark Wizard catcher. Your life is framed with beliefs and morals and strict principles that keep you rigid even when the world is crumbling beneath your feet. And do you really think it's right, to go about disrupting the lives of wizards and witches? To catch them and put them in Azkaban, where they would go mad with grief and sorrow and depression and end their own lives? Is it the money? Or is that really what you call the law?

"When my Lord takes up his reign, that will all change. No longer will the law become unjust, and no longer will unhealthy lifestyles - breeding with muggles, for instance - be tolerated. There will be a new order, and a new life… but that will not bring my husband back…"

She leaned back into her chair, her eyes hooded.

Kingsley said, "You are quite mad."

"I know," Bellatrix said. "Oh, I know. You made me that way. You and your filth made me, you created me, and now you have to deal with the consequences."

The sole of her heavy boot smashed into his face and knocked him and the chair over, backwards. Bellatrix was up, and she had her bat, clenched between her gloved hands, and she slammed it, again and again, at Kingsley's prone body. He struggled - naturally - but he was securely tied, and so Bella did not fear retaliation.

She beat him, watching his skin and flesh split beneath the force, listening to bones crack. She stomped on him over and over, pummelling and mashing him with her boots, pounding him to a bruised battered bloody mess. She crushed his throat beneath her heel and slammed the bat repeatedly against his skull until it cracked and dashed his brains all across the carpet.

And then she stopped.

Her chest was heaving and there was sweat in her eyes. She let the bat fall beside the mess she had made and she picked up the duffel bag and went upstairs, trailing blood wherever she stepped. There was blood on her clothes and face as well, she knew, but the black camouflaged it well enough - and she could wash her face later, she decided.

She looked into each room until she found an office, and then she began to pile every file she could find into her duffel bag. Normal reports, secret orders, anything.

The house had been well-warded, but the spells had only been placed in the walls - once Bella got inside it was all free reign.

Then she looked into his bedroom, and went through his possessions. She found money, jewellery, some more papers, id cards. And then, finally, she found the room that held his small but useful library.

She didn't have a lot of time. She knew that Kingsley could perhaps be needed for an Order meeting, and his absence would be noted and people may be sent. She cast her eyes across the room, and found a book lying on the desk. Her eyes trailed off its cover and her heart jumped.

The book was normal enough, but beside it there was something that looked like a day journal, or an account book - maybe anything, really. But it might help. She checked around again and found a shoebox full of letters - useless or valuable, and if it was the latter, then they would be coded.

Then she took a towel from the bathroom and went back downstairs, and picked up her cricket bat. She set the bag of files down and cleaned the gore from her weapon. She threw the towel across the shattered remains of Kingsley's head, stomped on him again a few more times for good measure, and picked the bag back up and left through the front door.

The blood left boot prints all along the pavement.

She was forced to go into the backseat of the car and crawl up to the front to get behind the steering wheel to prevent laying any more tracks. She wanted everyone to think she had Apparated, not gone off in a car.

She looked out the window at the house for a long time. She would not set off a Dark Mark, she decided. She wanted everyone to be surprised at what they found.

x

When Kingsley Shacklebolt didn't show up for the meeting, Severus Snape resisted the urge to light up a fag and, instead, looked around at the other Order Members with his usual cold indifference when Moody sent Lupin and Hestia out to check up on Shacklebolt.

Severus was glad Moody hadn't sent Tonks. From a slightly parental point of view, Severus didn't want her to see whatever Bella had left behind.


	7. vi

VI

Night had fallen by the time Bellatrix returned to headquarters, though she had spent some time driving along with a blood red sun glaring at her eyes.

Her boots had dried by that time, but still she took care to tread mostly upon the grass in case anything flaked off from the sole of her boots. She lugged the duffel bag with her, weighted down with files and papers. She wasn't sure how useful they were, but that wasn't her job.

She took off her boots once she got inside, and set them aside for cleaning. Then she went into the kitchen.

"Where's Peter?" She asked Voldemort, politely.

"Sleeping," Voldemort replied, scrutinizing his notebook. Then he looked up at her. "You've got blood on you."

"I know," Bella said. She went upstairs and found Peter's room, and went inside without asking. She went over to the bed - Peter was already awake, light sleeper that he was - and dropped the bag on his stomach.

"Can you look through these?" She asked. It came out as a question, oddly enough. Usually she wouldn't have bothered.

"Right now?" he asked.

"Right now."

"Alright," Peter said, huffily.

"Thanks, darling."

"You've got blood on you."

"I know."

She needed to take a shower.

x

She leaned towards the hot jet of water, hungrily. It burned her skin, cleansed her. Cleansed her of what, though, she wasn't sure. It stung the half-healed cuts on her face and body. Voldemort was right - they were going away.

The water had long ago stopped turning red from the blood it was washing away, but she wasn't ready to get out yet. She gathered her long hair up in her hands and pressed the slick, wet locks to her mouth.

The coils of hair in her mouth were wet and warm on her tongue and lips, strangled her, suffocated her. She breathed heavily through her nostrils, huge, heaving sobs, and she cried for a long time in that shower, Bellatrix did, until her tears stopped coming and the last of them had washed down the drain at her feet.

No matter how angry she was it couldn't mask how sad she felt.

x

The body had begun to fill up the house with its stench by the time Lupin got there.

Lupin had a strong stomach, but Hestia didn't - she rushed for the nearest bathroom, emptying her guts into the toilet, retching herself bare, while Lupin examined the corpse.

Lupin was a werewolf, and he was experienced in death. The smell of meat was hot in his nose; from the strength of it Lupin judged that Kingsley had been killed before sundown, for it hadn't baked in the heat.

The body was still warm, as well. Tracks of gore and bodily fluids lead out of the room. Lupin followed them, cautiously, not sure whether or not the house was unoccupied.

He needn't have worried.

The office was ransacked, and so was the bedroom. Lupin ducked into various other rooms - there were few, as Kingsley lived by himself - and found nothing too out of the ordinary. The killer hadn't had time to check everything, then.

The footprints had faded, but Lupin knew that they would refresh themselves soon enough, when the murderer left. He had seen dried blood on the pavement on his way to the front door, and it had been a warning to him as to what lay inside.

Lupin went downstairs and checked on Hestia. Her usual pink cheeks were pale.

"So he's dead," she said.

Yes. Kingsley was dead.

Lupin was quite certain who had killed him.

It had to have been Bellatrix.

There was nothing to say that it was even a Death Eater - no Dark Mark, nothing. It could easily have been a Ministry Official, an assassin, someone who wanted Kingsley's work or for him to die or anything else. There weren't merely two sides to this War, though that's what most people believed. There had to be a dozen different sides, fighting in the conflict, some taking advantage of the other.

But the thing was, Lupin could smell her. He could smell Bellatrix - it was a heady scent. When Lupin had been younger he had always admired Bellatrix, four years his senior, with her long dark hair and engaging laugh. He had never told Sirius because Sirius would have hit him if he had. Bellatrix was Off Limits, even if Sirius never talked to her and mostly pretended she didn't exist.

Lupin could smell sweat and spice and anger. He fancied he could taste it, too. It was Bellatrix Lestrange, alright, filled with blood and fire and rage. The females of the Black Clan could be _very _emotional at times.

"Hestia," Lupin said gently, "get a message back to Grimmauld and tell them about Kingsley. I have to go find Mundungus before she does."

x

Bellatrix quickly towelled her body dry and then walked out of the bathroom wearing absolutely nothing, her hair still a tangled, dripping mess. She strode down the hallway and into her bedroom, leaving the door open, and pulled on a pair of ratty underwear and sleek black trousers. She put on a bra, turned around, and saw Pyrites leaning against the doorway.

"You know," he said, "I believe you had more impressive breasts before you went to Azkaban. All of that starvation and thin living went and threw half your cup size out the window."

"Thank you for that, Pyrites," Bellatrix said. "Your kind thoughts get me through the day, and your philosophical musings cause me pause in the middle of my dreary life and _think_."

Pyrites was lovely and Lucius Malfoy had positively detested him. Bellatrix found him bearable, unless he tried to assert dominance in the household. Voldemort let his followers do as they wished when it came to who was at the top of the pecking order. Bellatrix had held the position for a long time. Pyrites had always wanted it.

Pyrites was never going to get it, either, so long as Bella had her way.

"Women like you eat men for breakfast, Bellatrix, me included," Pyrites said, with a bit of a sigh. "I wish I had gotten to you first before Rodolphus."

"So I could chew you up and spit you out as well?" Bellatrix said, brushing past Pyrites and going down the hall. Pyrites drifted behind her in mild interest and watched her stride into Peter's room as if she owned it. He was at his desk.

"You're not wearing a shirt," Peter told her. Peter tended to say the obvious to her, not because he thought Bellatrix hadn't noticed it or something of the sort, but because his thoughts and her thoughts simply did not mesh very well. Stating what truly was instead of voicing opinion was simply the safest way for the two of them to coexist. Voldemort would not protect Peter if he got in Bellatrix's way.

"I know," Bellatrix said. "Have you gone through the files?"

"Some." Peter said. "I think most of these are all done in code, so it will take longer than expected."

Peter had not been the most talented student, but he was bright enough. Peter's schoolwork in his younger years had been average - he'd had a cause to be distracted often from his assignments. But now, years later, with Bellatrix Lestrange breathing down his neck, Peter could accomplish some truly wonderful things.

"Ah," Bellatrix said. "Well, alright. I'll be downstairs. I might leave again."

Bella turned and she went past Pyrites and she went back into her room to put on a crisp white button-up shirt. And then she went downstairs, like she said.

x

Dumbledore was thinking.

He was always thinking, technically. But now he was thinking, pondering, scheming. And though _scheming _tended to suggest some wickedness behind everything, Dumbledore was a wicked person. It was just harder to see; like how the fact that Lord Voldemort really could be quite nice when he wanted to was hard to see.

Dumbledore thinking made Severus uncomfortable. It made him terrified, and anxious, and made him want to hyperventilate. Dumbledore thinking was more frightening than Voldemort thinking, and a lot of times Severus was unsure why.

The reports had all been made, and Lupin was absent. Severus wanted to leave. There was something bothering him, tickling the back of his neck. Something dark and aggressive and smart. Bellatrix Lestrange had killed Kingsley Shacklebolt, though the evidence of this was thin, and Lupin was absent still, which didn't make him look very innocent. Claiming Lestrange was the killer and then rushing off? Suspicious.

Moody certainly thought so. But Moody thought everything was suspicious, and it had kept him alive. Of course - and Severus felt somewhat scornful when he thought it - Moody was due for a heart attack any day now.

"This is a blatant attack - either upon the Order or the Ministry. I am still unsure," Dumbledore said, gravely. He didn't mention that fact that there may be another few sides involved, though everyone was thinking it - thinking that maybe, just maybe, Kingsley was a traitor, and there was another player in this game. Everyone except Severus, that is, who had as much blood on his hands as Bellatrix did when it came to the murder. "Everyone must be aware that another attack may come at any time, and that we must gather ourselves together upon the offensive."

Those seated at the table remained silent. Upstairs, there was nothing - no children. The Weasley children, who had occupied the house last summer with Hermione Granger and Harry Potter, were absent, back at their own home, away from the grime of Grimmauld Place. Despite all of the cleaning, it was still dirty - doors remained locked and shadows remained unlit.

Without Sirius Black around, nobody wanted to disturb the darkness.

"This meeting is at an end," Dumbledore said, softly. He looked tired, and he was certainly worried. He got up to leave, and so did everyone else.

x

Bellatrix sat at the kitchen table beside Voldemort, and she ate. It was early in the morning, and she was eating cold pizza she had found in the fridge.

Voldemort, a man who never seemed to sleep, had chin-length brown hair that fell into his eyes and soft, pouting lips. It was not the face she had seen when she had come home (because she was beginning to think of it as home now).

He said, as he played cat's cradle, "So, what did you find out?"

"Nothing," Bellatrix said. She was disappointed.

"My poor darling Bella," Voldemort said. He looped the string about his fingers some more. "Did you go and bother Wormtail?"

"Yes."

"With what?"

"Papers and files. I wanted him to go through them."

"Ah." Voldemort said. And then he said, "Bring them down here to me."

Bellatrix looked at him; then she went back upstairs, and when she came down Peter was with her, and so was Pyrites, who wordlessly started to make coffee.

Peter set the files on the table in front of Voldemort. The cat's cradle had disappeared.

Voldemort looked at files. He flicked through them, delicately, and then, with purpose, pulled one out from the pile.

He read, "July fifth, Nineteen ninety six, send message with MF to nightclub on eighty-sixth with target and date. Northern Lights."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Voldemort said, "I suggest you sleep for a few hours and then take a trip down to the club and speak with the owner. He might have noticed something."

"How did you do that?" Bellatrix asked, bluntly, staring at the pile of paper.

Voldemort shrugged. "I chose a piece of paper."

"How did you know it was the right one?"

"I just did."

"My lord-"

"Go to sleep, Bellatrix."

Bellatrix looked at him. Then she picked up the piece of paper, stared at it, then she looked at Voldemort again. And then she sat back down beside him, put her head in her arms, and within moments she was asleep.

"I am going out," Voldemort said to Pyrites. He stood up and he left the kitchen.

x

Pyrites followed Peter back upstairs.

"She's a saucy one, isn't she," Pyrites said.

Peter shrugged. "Bellatrix is Bellatrix," he stated, firmly.

"She doesn't like you."

"Not really, no." Peter said.

Usually, a conversation like that opened up to a larger, deeper one, the sort that is the history behind schemes and manipulations and murders. But Peter was smart because he knew this, and he shut the door in Pyrites' face before the man could whisper something sacrilegious into Peter's ear.

"You're a lot smarter than you seem," Pyrites said with a sigh to Peter's closed door.


	8. vii

**To those who have commented so far, thank you.**

VII

It was a nice enough place for a nightclub. The Northern Lights, it was called. Bellatrix could see that it was a place that thrived on the underbelly, and the people that wanted to be there - the slashers and the thieves and the people who pretended they were important but weren't, really.

It was also a place where you could get a good drink, she supposed. The place wasn't really considered open until eight at night, and it was only three in the afternoon - Bellatrix had had a long sleep and had also spent time getting ready for whatever she planned to do, which accounted for her lateness. She should have been there are noon.

Still, they let her in, because she asked, politely. Manners could get you anywhere.

She was let in by a thin woman in a long skirt, and was escorted to the owner, who must have lived somewhere nearby to be around so early. He had dark blonde hair and wore it in his eyes, and had the wasted look of a cocaine addict. They both took seats at the bar, and he ordered drinks for them.

"What can I do for you, miss?" he asked. His eyes passed briefly over her body before settling once again on her face. The cuts had disappeared overnight. "Are you looking for a job?"

"No," Bella said. She smiled a little at the girl, who set a shot glass of an amber-coloured liquid in front of her and the owner. "No. I'm looking for information, actually."

"Really." The owner lit a cigarette. "What kind of information? It's not really good policy for me to rat out my customers, if that's what you're aiming for."

"I'm sorry, but that's exactly what I'm aiming for," Bella said, dryly. "I'm not sure if you can actually help me, however. I'm looking for someone who came here several nights ago, and looked suspicious. But everyone looks suspicious here, I guess."

"Not really," the owner said mildly, tapping ash into the nearest ash tray. Bella found out later that his name was Daniel. "Most of the cunts who come in here, they all look suspicious because that's how they think they should look. But then you get the whackos, the real deal, and they fit right in. Are you looking for someone suspicious by the fact he doesn't look suspicious at all?"

"Probably," Bellatrix said. She was infuriated by her lack of information, but continued on. She could do this. She was smart. Wasn't she? "Did you see anyone who stood out from the crowd? And he would probably have taken a table with a few other people…"

"Like I said," Daniel said, waving his hand vaguely in no clear direction, "It wouldn't be good for me to sell information." Then he paused. "But it's not club policy for the girls to keep their traps shut."

"Oh." Bellatrix smiled. "Thank you."

"I got a question for you," Daniel said conversationally, stubbing the cigarette out in the tray. "Were you ever a dancer, an exotic one, I mean? A stripper, whatever." His tone was clear and courteous - not meant to be piggish, genuinely curious, businesslike. "It's just that you move like a cat when you walk. I get the impression you can move however you like, you just feel like moving like a cat right now. Haven't seen a girl walk like that in a decade. Beautiful balance."

Bellatrix laughed, sincerely amused. "No. I've done a lot of other things in my life, though. And I came from the sort of family where I had to balance books on my head. I've done all sorts of things."

"Are you a murderer?"

"Yes," Bellatrix said honestly, with a shrug.

"You're a smart girl," he said. "My name's Daniel. My girls are around, straightening the place out for tonight. If you come back tonight, the drinks are on me."  
"Thanks," Bellatrix said, downing her glass and sliding off the barstool. The club was very large, she noticed, and had several stories that went up and up, floor after floor of intrigue and music.

Bellatrix wandered through the first section of the club, which took up most of the establishment, and its purpose was obviously just a place for people to dance and get drunk. But the next room was what she wanted - a place of tables and booths; a dining area. She moved over to a redhead, who was taking down chairs.

"Um, excuse me?" Bellatrix asked. The girl turned to look at her. She had to be in her twenties - over a decade younger than Bellatrix herself. "Were you working for the past month?"

"Yeah," the girl said. She had a moody, challenging look, as if she expected to be attacked at any time. "Why?"

"Well," Bella said, unsteadily. She wasn't nervous, but she didn't want to spook the girl into keeping her mouth shut. "I'm looking for someone who was here from the sixth to the eighth of July." The order to send a message had been relayed on the fifth and Rodolphus had died on the eighth. She wished she had not spent so long crying and moping and sulking; she wished she had leapt upon the trail immediately while it was still warm.

"How the fuck am I supposed to know that?" the redhead asked.

Bellatrix shrugged. "When people come here," she asked, "who sits where?"

There was always an order to these things. Some tables belonged to new groups, some to old groups. And there had to be a table in here which was reserved for some type of kingpin. Anyone, anything.

"Well," the redhead said, "I mean, the real hard asses sit over there," she pointed, "every Thursday night. You mean like that?"

"Yeah. If someone were to have a meeting, or whatever, maybe not necessarily regulars, but-?"

"Oh." The redhead pondered. "Then between the door and the back wall. The booths, I mean. They always go there. Don't want to be seen from the door, but don't want to be pinned to the wall because they don't own the place, and on the first floor because they want a way out."

"I see. Do you remember any of them?"

The redhead laughed, harshly. "Woman, you never remember faces here if you want to live, unless they're regulars and you're their favourite waitress."

"I see."

Then Bellatrix paused.

"Can I see the bills?" she asked.

"The what?"

"The bills. The bills from table order. From the sixth to the eighth of July. You keep them, don't you?"

The redhead shrugged a little.

Bellatrix reached into the back pocket of her jeans, and drew out a wallet, from which she took out three bills.

They were bills with large sums imprinted on them.

"This way," the waitress said. She pocketed the money, turned, and strode out back to the bar, and to the cupboards beneath the register. She opened a compartment there, and took out a locked box.

"Why the lock and key?"

"Because it's evidential proof," the girl grinned. "When there's a crime, some people will pay thousands of dollars for these bills whenever there's a court case."

"Ah."

"The criminals, I mean, not the government itself, or whatever the hell goes on for trials. Enemies and allies of the condemned always want these." She separated a pad of paper from the rest and handed it to Bellatrix.

Bellatrix took it and she flipped through, her eyes searching for something, anything even remotely familiar.

And then she saw it.

_RL, MF_, in messy waitress writing.

"I have a question," Bella said, suddenly. The redhead, with money in her pocket, looked alert. Bella handed the bill to her. "Do you remember that order?"

The girl studied it. "I do," she said. "Three men, dark-looking. One of them grabbed at my ass and he smelt like compost," she added, "that's how I remembered. Ordered a margarita. Said his name was Dung, I thought it must have been some stupid fake name he made up while he was drunk."

"I have another question. Do you always serve food here, or is it just alcohol?"

"Well, yeah. Food, I mean. That's what the booths are originally for, for diners. There's more private dining upstairs for the, well, you know. The more important people."

"So you have cutlery?"

"Yeah."

"What is it?"

The waitress thought for a bit. "Sterling silver, I think. Danny only wants the best, even if the crowd is less than stellar."

"Was there anything unusual about the men and the cutlery?"

The girl didn't seemed bothered by how odd the questions were. Bella had practically bribed her with three decent night's wages. "They didn't order food, so I had to clear it all away."

"Alright," Bella said. "Well, thanks a lot. And do me a favour and not tell anyone about me."

The girl shrugged. "Why not? Some fellow walks in and hands me more bills than you have, what am I to do? I'm a working girl."

"And those men probably killed my husband," Bellatrix said, "I'm trying to do something about that."

"Oh." The waitress gave Bella a surprisingly penetrating look. "And you loved him?"

"Of course."

"And he loved you?"

"I took him to Hell and back and he never once complained," Bellatrix said.

"Ah." The girl left the bar and went back to the other side of the large room, taking down chairs. "Maybe I'll keep my mouth shut, then."

x

Fucking werewolf.

MF and RL. Remus Lupin and… _Mundungus Fletcher_. That had to be it. Bellatrix wasn't stupid, she knew crime, though not as well as she used to. Fletcher was clever and he was well-known. He was crafty, too. But Bellatrix's best friend from her schooldays had been Lucius Malfoy, and because of him, she could be pretty crafty as well.

And Lupin…

She didn't like thinking about Lupin.

x

It was raining. Lupin walked through it in a sort of self-destructive misery. He had been unable to find Mundungus. Lupin also knew his own disappearance from the meeting was suspicious, but he was only trying to look out for his fellow Order members. But Mundungus was an idiot; sometimes Lupin wondered how the man had managed to stay alive for so long.

Mundungus, however, was a streetwise man for all his idiocy. He knew how to play around with words, he knew his way through the wizarding Black Market, he knew a lot of things. Unfortunately, Mundungus probably wouldn't know that Bellatrix was a deadly enemy.

Lupin ducked into a store to get out of the rain. He smelt incense, and tea. It was one of those shops, an earthy sort of shop, that gave off an impression of dried flowers.

Lupin's overcoat was damp. He had flipped the collars up while he was outside, and now flipped them down. Then he turned on his heel and he saw Severus Snape of all people near the back of the shop where several books were on sale, holding a rosary.

Severus had never struck Remus as a religious man, and he was very correct in this diagnosis. But that didn't explain the rosary. Lupin made his way past displays of aromatherapy candles and scented oils towards the other man.

Severus didn't once look Lupin's way, but Severus knew the werewolf was there in that uncanny way of his; like how Severus knew there was someone behind a corner before he turned it. "Moody thinks you're trouble," Severus commented, twisting the beads of the rosary around his long, thin, brittle-looking fingers. "But Moody thinks everything is trouble. Especially the weather."

"It's raining," Lupin said, mildly. "You converting?"

"No." Severus said. Then he smiled. It was grim looking.

Severus looked severely out of place in the almost friendly shop, dressed in his usual black, somewhat damp and smelling of rain and, to Lupin's sharp nose, liquor. But Severus was anything but drunk. He was too paranoid to risk becoming inebriated.

"You disturb people," Lupin said suddenly, shoving his hands into the pockets of his caramel-coloured coat. "And you aggravate people. And you do a lot of other things to people. So why are you still alive?"

"Why are you?" Severus replied.

Lupin would have responded, but just then a woman walked up. Her dark skin had an almost leathery look to it. "Mr Snape," she greeted, her voice thick and rich. Her eyes flickered towards Lupin, puzzled but friendly. "I didn't know you were bringing company."

"He is not with me," Severus stated flatly. "And I have your rosary."

"Yes. Yes, so you do," the woman smiled. She had a trace of unease about her. "Shall we talk?"

"Yes, we shall," Severus said. He looked to Lupin; then, just as quickly, dismissed the other. Lupin smiled thinly as he watched the woman lead Severus through a back door, wondering what the hell was going on.

Lupin looked at the bookshelves. Several of the books were laid flat so that he could look at the front covers rather than just the spines. One book had a picture of what looked to be the Aztec calendar on the front. Time was running out, Lupin remembered, his smile fading. He wandered back to the front of the store, looking out the window, ignoring the other customers, who ignored him.

It was still raining, but Lupin went outside anyway. The rain felt good on his face.

Outside, he bumped into a priest. He was getting his fill of religious things today, wasn't he - first Severus with a rosary and now running face-first into a crisp white collar.

He apologized, and moved on - failing to notice, in his preoccupied way, the flash of red eyes as the priest turned away, scattering droplets of water from his black umbrella.


	9. viii

**It has suddenly occurred to me that I have less than a week to finish this story before Harry Potter and the High Blood Pressure comes out and renders this story completely irrelevant. So… shit! I'm totally going to motor it. I will finish it. I will!**

VIII

Bellatrix sat by herself in her car. Her hair was wet from the rain. The car was running, and the wipers swiped back and forth across the windshield. Her eyes unconsciously followed the movement.

Where does one find a crook, Bella thought. Where can you find someone like Mundungus Fletcher?

His records weren't in the files the Death Eaters kept… Fletcher had never been connected with the Order, due to his crooked past and present… there had been whispers of a trial and Dumbledore, but Bellatrix had never thought that the Headmaster would aid a criminal in evading the law…

She had never thought that Fletcher could be a member…

There was no telling for sure, but that didn't matter. Bellatrix shook her head as if to clear fog from inside her skull. She was sinking back into the fourteen-year-old mentality, where people like Professor Dumbledore never did anything questionable. Dumbledore was as much a hero as Voldemort was, and as much of a villain. She kept forgetting that, kept thinking that Dumbledore had no say in the war except the say he had with Lord Voldemort.

Silly girl.

Bellatrix turned on the radio. It was on a classical station. She frowned. Pyrites must have been toying with it again - Bella always favoured the local punk station.

The raindrops beat a soldier's pace against the windows and the roof. She did not move from where she was parked in the parking lot. She stayed where she was, thinking, thinking. And, in the back of her mind, hating.

Mozart beat out a string of emotion on the piano while she sat there. Then she shifted gears, and she drove.

x

The back of the shop was a lot different from the front.

It was somewhat cluttered. Near the front of the storeroom were all the products sold in the store, but as one moved farther inward the objects became less cosy and more bizarre. A door led off to a workroom, but Severus and the woman - Nora - passed it by for the moment.

"So how much trouble did it take you to get it back?" she asked. They stopped in front of a table, where a large variety of items were laid out. Severus cast a collector's eye over them.

"Quite a bit," Severus said mildly. He was still twisting the rosary around his fingers. "Where did you get these?"

Nora shrugged and smiled.

Severus was quiet for a moment, and then handed the rosary to Nora. She took it with shining eyes.

"My father made this for me," she said. "He said it would always protect me…"

"Lord knows," Severus said dryly, turning his attention back to the table. He picked up a chipped, triangular piece of obsidian - an arrowhead. He held it up, and light glinted along the sharp, cruel edge. It tingled with power as he held it; wanting to be fired, wanting to tear, rip, kill. "This is an interesting piece, Nora," he said. "Not at all like your usual array."

"You've noticed, then."

"I notice everything," Severus said frankly. The arrowhead was infused with power, and not the sort of power Nora usually dealt with, which was a religious, holy power. The arrowhead held a demonic quality that Severus did not like.

"Everything on the table is yours," Nora said, matter of fact.

Severus raised his eyebrow at her. "All of it?"

"All of it."

"That must be quite some rosary."

Nora smiled again. She had an unsettling smile. She claimed to be Catholic, but there was something lustful about her that made Severus raise his eyebrows, and then look away. Nora was something else, all right.

"Not to pry, Severus," she said. "But what exactly are you planning to do with all this equipment?"

Severus' look had a deadpan quality to it. "Kill things." he said, beginning to wrap the objects up in rags and carefully arranging them in a leather bag.

"Oh." Nora said. "Well. The book is here, as you requested."

Severus picked up the slim, leather-bound volume, and looked at it critically. Forgeries of it were abundant, and Severus had found himself saddled with at least three useless versions of the book in the past few years. Of course he'd always managed to resell them and claim they were the real thing - but it was still irritating.

"Where did you get this one, again?" he asked.

"I never saw his face," Nora said, shrugging.

"You stole it when he was sleeping."

"Don't be silly, Severus," she said, with a curling smile. "Stealing is sinful."

"Right," Severus said, with a shrug. He shoved the book into an inner pocket of his coat, hefted up the bag, and left through the back of the shop.

x

Bellatrix felt sick.

As she drove she could feel it building in her, like vomit that wanted to come up. What was wrong with her? Why couldn't she keep food down anymore? Was it Rodolphus?

_And it won't stop raining_, she thought angrily. _It won't stop fucking raining. I wish it would stop. I want it to stop_.

She was going to vomit…

No, she wasn't.

Bellatrix flipped through the stations until finally a song appealed to her. She turned it up until the electric guitar dragged fingernails down her spine. It wasn't the Sex Pistols, but it would do.

She wasn't going to get sick. Even though her body wanted to. But her body had no say in what her mind wanted to do, she decided; she would have total control.

Her vision swam for a moment; then it clicked into place, sharp and focused and crystalline.

And that was when it stopped raining.

x

Mundungus tamped down his pipe in the soggy back alleys of London. His matted, gingery hair was damp with rain.

He glanced up. Sunlight had burned its way through the clouds; the streets were starting to glow. Mundungus just shook his head a little and lit his pipe. Typical. You could never trust London weather, he supposed, even if you'd lived there as long as he had.

He went back inside.

x

Lord Voldemort shook out his umbrella and closed it, and looked up at the sky. He appeared somewhat confused for a moment. But then it went away.

x

She knew what to do.

She thought about Lord Voldemort.

She thought about how he knew how much money was in your pocket without being told, how he could see what kind of card you were holding - queen of hearts, ace of spades, anything, everything - when all he really should have seen was just the patterned back. She thought about Lord Voldemort knowing what you wanted to do before you even thought about it.

And when he told her how many grains of sand were in the hourglass in his bedchamber, she knew he was telling the truth. And she thought about how it had stopped raining.

She found a payphone. The rain left glistening puddles on the pavement. She slotted in her coins and, slowly, randomly, with no thought whatsoever, dialled a number.

She put the phone to her ear, and expected the machine to ask for more change, figuring she had dialled a long-distance number.

Then it started to ring.

"'Lo?" a dark voice asked.

"Sorry, love," Bellatrix said, her voice thick and bubbly, so unlike her own. "Wrong number."

She hung up, found a pen in her pocket, and wrote the number down on her hand.

Then she put in more change, and dialled another number. This was a number she knew and never used.

Luckily, it was Andromeda, and not Ted, that picked up.

"I have a question," Bellatrix asked, without preamble. She could hear her sister take a quick breath of surprise on the other end.

Andromeda could say any number of things. She could say anything. She could scream, she could tell her sister to fuck off, she could just hang up.

What Andromeda said was, "What?"

"Do you still love me, Annie?" Bella asked.

"…What?"

"Do you still love me?"

Andromeda was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," she said slowly, after a moment, "Yes, I suppose I still do."

"Good." Bella said, relieved. "And I still love you too. How stupid is that?"

"Very stupid."

"We're stupid, Annie."

"We are."

"Bye."

"Goodbye."

Bellatrix hung up, starting to feel a little better about things.

x

Tonks sat in her kitchen, smoking. She was on her fourth cigarette of the day, and was sucking it down and bringing it back up like cheap champagne. Her striking blond hair, styled into a luxurious waterfall along her shoulders, glinted in the type of sunlight that always came after rain.

She had the matchbox Severus had given her on the table in front of her. Her mouth, painted the raw red of cherries, twisted a little. What a horrid way to gain an inheritance, she thought.

She stretched out on her chair, looking at the ceiling. Kingsley was dead. It made her sad - she'd always liked him. He was a nice bloke. He really oughtn't have died - but that was war for you. Especially this kind of war, with the backhanded killing and the dark plots and the anger that came from no discernible source.

"At least I'm sane," Tonks said softly to herself, blowing smoke upwards. Everyone else was absolutely off their fucking rocker. She couldn't understand it. She'd joined the Order of the Phoenix because, she had thought, it was the right thing to do. And, in a way, it was. She believed in it, certainly. She wanted to stop the killing, she wanted to help tamp everything down; to stop the disease with no knowledge of the needed medication.

She may have been sane, but she was an idiot. _It's like I went to join the peacekeepers and accidentally signed up for the army_, she thought to herself. But she couldn't get out. You never deserted any membership. Her superiors always said that when you joined the Death Eaters it was a commitment you kept for the rest of your life, and that those who tried to leave were killed - just like her cousin, Regulus Black.

But they never mentioned that it was the same with the Order - that if you wanted to leave everyone called you coward, useless, frightened; that you were monitored and maybe even killed, because you were a vessel of knowledge and if a Death Eater found you and managed to weasel out information, as weak-minded as you were, then you could cost dozens of people their lives.

They say that you have to choose between what's right and what's easy. Tonks thought that that was a load of bollocks - what were you drawing from, anyway? What's right for you, and what's right for everyone else? When were you granted the gift of selfishness?

She had to go out, she decided. She was thinking too much. She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, and went to her room to go through her clothes. Time to go clubbing.

x

Bellatrix phoned one more time.

"Peter," she barked, when he picked up the phone. "Got a pen and paper? Good. I want you to find out the address belonging to this number. I'll call back in ten minutes."


	10. ix

**character death. sort of.**

IX

Bellatrix bit her lip and swore and drove. She had stopped once more at headquarters to do her makeup - thick and bold and daring, dark red lipstick and black eye shadow and eyeliner thick as crayon - and the Dark Lord had not been there, so she had been unable to tell him anything. She had not seen him since she had fallen asleep at the table, early in the morning. This did not disconcert her (though she was uneasy when he was absent ever since the events of Halloween 1981), but she still missed his presence deeply.

She must be getting lipstick on her teeth as she tore her lips apart - how unfortunate. She glanced into the rectangle of her rear-view mirror, saw the unevenness of her lip colour. She'd have to reapply it somewhere private. A lady never put on lipstick in public.

She worried a little about Lucius, locked up, and then she worried about her nephew Draco and her sister Narcissa, and how they were faring. Bella knew Narcissa could take care of herself, but Draco was still a loose end. He hadn't yet joined the Death Eaters, and the last thing Bella wanted was Draco joining to, in some way, avenge his father's incapacitation. People like that never made good Death Eaters. They were too footloose, too emotional.

Still, that was not her problem now. Her problem was her next target.

Mundungus Fletcher was a very unusual person. Cocky, but not. Smart, but not. Responsible, but not. Bellatrix did not connect with him like she had managed to connect with Kingsley. Fletcher was of another breed altogether. She did not like this breed, found it disgusting that it was still alive. Still, if they hadn't been killed off by now, then they must serve some purpose. Like mosquitoes. Drove you mad, but fed the bats. And Bellatrix liked bats.

x

It had stopped raining, but there was still water on the park bench. Voldemort didn't care; he went and sat on it anyway. Beside him, Dumbledore was reading a book.

"It stopped raining," Dumbledore said mildly.

Voldemort ignored him, busied himself with leaning his black umbrella against his leg and taking in the scenery.

"Bellatrix does not like rain," Voldemort said, after a moment.

"Did she kill Kingsley?"

"That's a silly question," Voldemort said. He said _silly _as if it was just another word, a word just as serious as _agoraphobia _or _homicide _or _perversion_, and not something five-year-old girls giggled during sleepovers.

"Yes," Dumbledore said, still pleasant. He was always calm and mild with Voldemort. He did it on purpose; he knew how unstable Voldemort could get around him, counted on it. Voldemort hated the older man even more for it - for treating Voldemort as if he were a puppet on a string.

Just thinking about talking with Dumbledore caused Voldemort to suffer serious stress. That's why little talks like these - the secret meetings of two masterminds, the purpose of which was merely for sport, if nothing else - happened so rarely. If Dumbledore had his way, he'd speak with Voldemort more often, maybe under the delusion he could work his magic and then Voldemort would become The Golden Boy, or something equally trashy. Voldemort only agreed to it because it reminded him _why _he hated Dumbledore so much. It was good for his cause.

And Voldemort did not ultimately fear betrayal through these meetings. Breaking pacts as sacred and old as these had a punishment. Voldemort knew Dumbledore was not strong enough for the old gods anymore.

The Headmaster probably thought he was, though, so still Voldemort was wary.

"Anything to say, Tom?" Dumbledore asked.

_My name is not Tom_, Voldemort thought immediately. Long ago he had decided not to argue anymore, though he would never be used to it. _Tom_. Ridiculous. The prodding of an old man with nothing left. "Not really, no," Voldemort said.

"Nothing? Have you nothing planned?" Dumbledore smiled his angry, crooked smile. "You're always scheming, Tom."

Dumbledore was always scheming as well, but Voldemort was not a man for miniature pokes and prods. He would let Dumbledore lie, to himself and others; it was none of Voldemort's business. "It is useless to remark on the future," Voldemort said, getting to his feet. He'd had enough. His priestly robes rustled softly. "Forming an opinion on what is yet to come brings no joy, nor pain."

"I see," Dumbledore said.

Voldemort nodded. "God Bless," he said, tucking his umbrella beneath his arm and wandering off.

x

Lucius was sitting in his cell. He had nothing better to do.

Most people preferred to keep Lucius distanced from the public. As in, the Ministry of Magic did. Few reporters had been able to catch a glimpse of Lucius since he'd been locked away - one reporter, obviously in it for the money, had flung himself across the hood of the car Lucius had been shoved into weeks earlier as he'd been taken to the Ministry itself. That photographer had managed to capture a photo of blonde hair and the annoyed face of the driver, and that was the most recent photo of Lucius the public had been supplied with.

Lucius could not be a person - he had to be a name, and a blur, and nothing more. Those who had known Lucius personally in the past preferred to scrub him from their memory, and treat him the way the papers treated him - nothing but black type on paper.

Lucius was fine with that. He didn't have long. Lucius Malfoy would not go to Azkaban - he refused to set foot there, refused to be tainted. He respected Bellatrix. He respected her strength, a strength he did not have. Bellatrix strode into Azkaban in a flurry of anger and fear, proudly refusing to denounce her Lord, no matter how many years went by. Until, finally, he had come for her.

Lucius did not have that courage. If Lucius was to be sentenced to Azkaban, then he would be certain that he would never set foot on the island. He'd rather die.

And he might have to do that himself.

Still, there was always a chance. It's never over till you're dead, anyway.

Lucius was lovely, in an old-fashioned sort of way. He was slim and aquiline and aristocratic. Sometimes, when Lucius was in the dark, and nothing but the dark, he was even beautiful. Something of the old world was in Lucius' blood, and it resurfaced when the modern world held no sway.

He sat with his back to the wall, inspecting his hands. He used to be able to palm read - something Narcissa had taught him back when they were younger, and their lives had been flowers and laughing and romance before parenting had come along. He couldn't for the life of him remember how to do it.

x

Mundungus lived in a dinghy flat somewhere in the south - or was it north? Bella hated directions - of London. It took her awhile to get there, especially since she seemed, halfway through her drive, to be taken with a fit of shudders, and nearly collided with a biker at an intersection.

It was a cheap place to live. People like Mundungus Fletcher were always moving. It had as much to do with survival as it had to do with whim. Bellatrix was fortunate - she'd found the right place.

She sat in her car for a moment. There were a lot of people around. It was late evening - it was time to go to clubs, and whathaveyou. People going out for dinner, people going out drinking and dancing, people going out to have sex in bathroom stalls. Human nature came out at night. Bellatrix liked that.

People ignored things, at this time of day. If someone was fighting in the room next to you, you didn't go and check. You turned up your music.

The alleyway where she had parked her car was deserted, so there was no one to ignore her anyway. She got out, and went into her trunk, and got out her duffel bag - filling it with only a few items so that it was light and easy to carry. She locked the doors and set out to walk the last block to the building, her black sneakers splashing into little puddles that had gathered on the uneven pavement.

A man gave her an openly inviting look as she passed, but she ignored him. She had not fixed her lipstick. She was still pretty.

She looked up at the building as she circled it, choosing the back door, through the alley. There was an open window and a fluttering curtain, a few floors up. She knew that that was his apartment.

Bellatrix thought, to hell with the security system, even though there wasn't really one, just a door that wouldn't let you in unless you had the key. Bellatrix didn't have the key, but the door let her in anyway; perhaps remembering, from a long time ago, when it was still a tree, that balance must be kept within the world, and here was a lady who held a pair of scales - and, after some rummaging in the bag, a crowbar.

She walked slowly up the stairs, as if her knees pained her. She went up three flights, her crowbar hanging limp in one hand and her bag in the other, before stopping and finding the door she wanted to go through.

She put down her duffel bag, and knocked.

x

Mundungus was a small, wiry man, and he was a very quick man. He glimpsed her face - and it was her real face, the face of a fellow criminal - and had nearly shut the door all the way before Bellatrix kicked it back open.

She threw herself into the apartment, but he was ready. People like Mundungus were always ready.

The iron coat stand and its decorative, sharply curved barbs nearly took out her eye as he shoved it at her. She tried to bat it aside with her crowbar; the vibrations jarring through the metal almost made her drop her weapon. But her determination brought her through it and she darted aside. The barbs scraped down her thigh.

Mundungus didn't talk. You never talked in fights like these. Instead, when Bellatrix sent her crowbar slamming against his head he jumped aside, and threw a cheap wooden chair at her, their fight having spilled right into the kitchen.

Bellatrix knew the place would be small, but hadn't factored that in. She found it cramped, and hard to manoeuvre a swinging weapon. Her wrist throbbed as she used her arms to block the chair, the crowbar managing to slide its way between the chair legs and become jerked to the side, bringing her arm with it.

And then Mundungus punched her, right in the face.

Bellatrix's nose bled, and her lip split immediately from the blow, and widened when, as she lost her balance and fell towards the floor, he elbowed her in the mouth.

It stung, and she was dazed, but she was still coherent. Coherent enough to kick, upwards, foot sinking into Mundungus' stomach.

Mundungus fell back, right against the countertop, reaching out to grab the edge and catch himself. Blood was dripping down Bellatrix's face as she tore back up to her feet, just in time to see Mundungus retrieve a carving knife from the counter.

Bella reached behind to her waist and drew her skinning knife - acquired at a hunting goods store - to raise it in retaliation. As the two blades struck one another Bella's wrist throbbed hotly, and she nearly dropped it, but didn't.

Mundungus' knife slid along her blade and downward, cutting at her forearm and slicing down near the elbow. Bella ignored this and lunged, knifepoint jabbing forward with the speed and anger of a striking cobra. Mundungus jumped back and hit the counter again.

Blood was beginning to spatter to the tiles, and all of it was Bella's. This made her angry, but it was not an illogical anger.

This was not going to be a kill like Kingsley. Kingsley was a kill for information. But Bella had all of her information now, and she knew her target, and she wouldn't stop until he was dead. Mundungus seemed to sense this.

He attacked her again, knowing that if he was cornered, he would probably lose. She twirled her knife in her hand to the correct position to properly block him, and avoided his kick. He pushed her back. Flecks of blood spattered the linoleum.

This was his apartment, and he knew it better than she did. They exchanged more stabs and slices, and no more blows were made until he went for her shoulder, and she pivoted away - and collided with the corner of the fridge.

He tried to stab her then, of course, but Bellatrix, using the fridge as leverage, pushed herself sideways and a little back.

She was still hit, but it wasn't as serious as it could have been - instead of her throat it skittered along her collarbone, slicing past layers of skin and clothing and opening up a thick well of blood and revealing bone. He swept his foot along the floor, knocking her legs out from beneath her, and she toppled back, slamming the back of her head on the ground.

He stepped, hard, on her fingers, and she let go of her knife - but then she kicked up, and dealt him a blow squarely beneath the chin.

She flipped onto her stomach and began to half crawl, half run, scrambling to her feet, needing space, needing to recuperate and to get her senses back. He tackled her just as she was about to regain her balance and she crashed forward, on carpet this time, and fell through the open doorway leading out of the flat.

She swore, loudly, the words distorted through her split lip, and desperately attempted to crawl away. He let go of her waist to grab at her hair, and she let out a shout as her head snapped backwards. Her uninjured hand, clawing for something to grip, hit the familiar material of her duffel bag just outside the door.

_Open! _she thought.

It was. Or it did. Bellatrix didn't take the time to think about it. Her fingers closed around the nearest object she could before Mundungus dragged her back into his flat.

She rolled over and kneed upward, hitting him squarely in the chest. He let out a grunt of pain and his hand snapped forward, palm outstretched, slamming it against her nose. If it wasn't broken before, it definitely was now.

Bellatrix disregarded it, swung what she was clenching in her hand around towards his head. It was light, and not very firm or supported or strong. It was a noose.

It caught and she pulled tight. Mundungus struck out at her in the immediate panic of a man whose air had been cut off, before she felt a strong tug on the rope and he was pulling her back.

Bellatrix let go of the rope to clutch farther along, nearer to the end. He scrambled away and got to his feet, loosening the noose. She jumped up and pulled, panicking, not wanting him to loose it enough so that he could slip it off.

They stood across from each other, breathing heavily. It was not a very long rope, but they were a good distance apart, and Bella had some extra length of rope dangling to the ground from where she held it. She clutched it with both hands, even though one of them didn't really want to work. Mundungus held his own end steady, gripping at the rope around his throat to prevent her from tightening it. But she gave him no room to loosen it, either. It was quiet, except for maybe the slight flutter of the curtains framing the open window in the TV room, and their breathing.

Bellatrix tried to spit out the blood filling her mouth, but found it difficult. And then, experimentally, she tugged. Mundungus stiffened and pulled back with equal strength.

Bellatrix threw her weight back against the rope, and Mundungus did the same in the opposite direction. She dominated the tug-of-war at first, but eventually her wrist and arm failed her and Mundungus gained several feet back, dragging Bella forward.

She grit her teeth and her grip tightened. She wrestled him back towards her end of the room for about half a metre before she immediately loosened her hands and let the rope slide through, and watched as Mundungus toppled backwards with the sudden freedom.

She gripped tight before the last of the rope slipped from her fingers, and he crashed right into the sill of the open window. She darted forward, quick and desperate, slamming him against it as he tried to push away. He elbowed her aside and her forehead collided with the top of the casement, but he was too late.

Bellatrix grabbed his legs and flipped Mundungus right through the window and then turned and ran, pulling, until the rope was stretched firmly with no more length left to spare. But it wasn't, she realised, taut.

She supposed this was a good thing - she doubted she could ever support his weight. She went to the end of the rope, tugging, until she could manage to get into the kitchen, working as fast as she could to tie the end to the best support she could find - the pipe under the sink.

She picked up her crowbar where it had fallen and went back to the window. As she suspected, Mundungus was clinging to the wall, just barely hanging on. He was breathing heavily through the tightened noose.

Bellatrix leaned out and began to hit him with the crowbar.


	11. x

X

Bella used Mundungus' bathroom to clean her face. On further inspection, she saw her bottom lip had split nearly all the way to her chin. It would leave a scar, unless she decided otherwise with magic.

She used his materials in the kit beneath the sink to bandage up her arm and rub some medication into the scrape along her thigh. Her collarbone had stopped bleeding profusely, though it seemed to ooze out blood whenever she made too fast a movement.

She checked her duffel bag and found a long coat of a creamy, pinkish hue. Bellatrix favoured pink tones, but her skin didn't match it - it made her look pale and somewhat garish, like a dead body. But that was fine. It hid her body wounds, and that was the important part, though her face was starting to bruise horribly. She prodded it experimentally, and grimaced, and hoped her nose wasn't ruined.

Before she left, she went through a chest in Mundungus' bedroom. As she had expected, the only valuables she found were things Mundungus would have sold later, probably at a higher price. She kept a few things that she discovered - a pocket watch; a notebook filled with phone numbers; a small bag of cocaine. As she shifted everything aside, her eyes were invariably drawn to a scrap of paper in a zip-lock bag.

Her eyes fell on it for no particular reason; perhaps because she was looking for something to aid her, and it was presenting itself to her gaze. She picked it up, feeling tense.

She unfolded it. _The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London_.

x

She remembered that place.

She remembered running up and down the stairs; she remembered her aunt grabbing Sirius by the ear and scolding him. She remembered Regulus, when he was still little; and her memory strongly recalled the scent of the lavender soap her mother always scrubbed her and her sisters with whenever they had to go and visit their aunt and uncle's home. _You are all ladies and must look and act as such_, their mother would say, and would then sigh in dismay when she saw the state Bellatrix was in at the end of the evening, covered in grime from wrestling with Sirius in the backyard.

This made sense. The house was Sirius', by familial right, and he was - had been - a member of the Order. And now that Bellatrix saw the words on the paper she knew the location, and she knew how to get in, and where to find it… everything. There had to be a Secret-Keeping charm on it, to make Bella forget for so long with no chance of recall - and here was the secret in her hand.

"What an asshole," Bellatrix said aloud, referring to Mundungus Fletcher. Mundungus had not destroyed the paper, as one was supposed to do lest it fall into the wrong hands. He had kept it, and perhaps he had wanted to sell it to the highest bidder when the time came, and it was right to make the move.

Criminals had a code of honour, this was true. But they were still grimy bastards.

Bellatrix stuffed the paper in her pocket, then pulled it back out for fear she had wrecked it. It was fine; she replaced it, more carefully this time, and then left the bedroom, and then the flat; her eyes lingering on the rope stretched taut across the room.

x

Voldemort was a God.

He had followers - a cult, in technical terms. He had power. He had people worshipping the ground he stood on. And, like all gods, he could be erased, and forgotten, and destroyed.

Dumbledore was a god as well, but in a less obvious way. And fellow gods never saw eye to eye - in ancient Greece they destroyed each other, devoured each other. In the Nordic religions, they chained half-breeds to mountains and poured snake venom in their eyes; stabbed other gods with stems of plants.

It was easy to kill a god, once you figured out how to do it. People thought it was difficult. In a sense, it was. Unfortunately, in another sense, it wasn't.

x

Voldemort was there when she got back. She was happy about this - _so _happy. And not just because he helped her get cleaned up.

Healing is not always a very comfortable process. Voldemort was not a healer, and untrained in the medical arts - at least, in the conventional sense. He had other ways that no one else alive was privy to.

Bellatrix would give anything to know what the Dark Lord had done, those years before she met him - silent and ageless years where he had traveled, and learned. He sat down with her on the bathroom floor and with a painful, crunching feeling, she felt him heal her nose. The bruises on her face were nicer to the touch - the brush of his lips smoothed them away, left her skin new and undamaged.

Bellatrix had the strange sensation that Voldemort was telling her skin to knit back together when his fingertips touched her collarbone and arm and mouth. He gripped her wrist in his hand and the pain went away, and stayed away when he let go.

She was so grateful that the look he gave her when she showed him the slip of paper made her stomach flip over with the combined feelings of euphoria.

"This changes things," Voldemort said, staring at the slanted handwriting. And he smiled.

x

There were things piled on the kitchen table.

When Bellatrix touched them through their gauzy black wrappings, she withdrew her hand with a touch of fear. They were cold, and dead, like her father's body lying in the coffin. But these had menace, and wickedness. These were made to kill.

Voldemort checked his watch. "His trial," he said, "is in less than ten hours. In nine hours, these things will be taken to the ministry."

"And I am to take them?" Bellatrix asked.

"No." Voldemort said. He looked less of a man than he had when he had gone to see Dumbledore. His hair was darker and more unmanageable, and he appeared about nineteen. His shirt had a yellow smiling face with crossed out eyes on the front that Bellatrix had seen on the clothes of several teenagers in her drives around London. "Others will take these. You have more pressing matters to attend to."

"What kind of matters?" Bellatrix asked. She had one more person to kill. But that could wait. Remus Lupin wasn't going anywhere.

Voldemort didn't answer. Bellatrix counted all the way to eight hundred and seventy-five before he finally did. His mind had obviously been somewhere else - Bellatrix had learned not to interrupt. He always came back in the end.

"You're going to Grimmauld Place," He said. "What will be going on at the Ministry will most likely leave the building deserted. You went there when you were younger. You spent summers pulling your cousins' hair and playing hide-and-seek."

"So I know," Bellatrix concluded, "all of the places they might hide something important."

Voldemort smiled thinly. "And what did you do today?"

"I went after Mundungus Fletcher."

"Did you kill him?"

Bellatrix thought for a moment. "I put the noose around his neck and pushed him out the window. He hung on, so I hit him. But he's the one that let go, in the end. Does that mean I killed him?"

Voldemort looked pensive. "That's a good question."

She didn't know if he was joking or not, but she didn't care.

x

Childhood memories are awful things.

They can be good or bad… in-betweens aren't often rampant. Most of Voldemort's childhood memories were bad - they involved lots of wishful thinking, and dirt, and grime, and concrete, and rats. He didn't think about them very often.

Bella's childhood memories were of another sort. Bella's memories involved vanilla and strawberries and pomegranate juice, and long walks in the forests and wrestling beneath the summer sun.

Her memories also included a lot of her family, because Bellatrix was raised to love family, and adore it, so long as they loved and adored her back. When Andromeda left her all alone, to forsake the needs of the family and pursue her own selfish wants and lusts, Bellatrix had not cried, even though she'd wanted to. Instead she'd sat on the bedroom floor with Narcissa, and held her while _she _cried, because crying made you feel better; and as an older sister Bella was forced to sacrifice her own needs for someone else's.

And Sirius was so out of reach by the time she'd managed to get to him, he looked at her as if he didn't know her at all; as if games played at number twelve didn't exist, and nights sneaking out of the house to camp in the fields were merely hallucinations and shadows of an alternate universe.

Bellatrix had lots of memories, and some of them made her hurt inside; others made her happy. Voldemort wanted her to go back and look at them. She believed she could do that.

She was the most suited for it, after all. She'd spent years in Azkaban, contemplating how to die, and then, how not to die, because she had to stay alive for Voldemort, and he _would _come and get her. And she'd spent years in number twelve, Grimmauld Place. Her childhood could not strike her down. Bella was too strong for that.

That was why she was going, and not Voldemort, and not anybody else.


	12. xi

'At my best when I'm terrorist, inside;  
At my best when it's all me.'  
--_Headful of Ghosts_, Bush

XI

At a little before nine, they came for him.

They pulled Lucius upright roughly. He did nothing to stop them; it's not like he cared.

Lucius had been a very egotistical man before he had been arrested. Part of his demeanour had been an act, but still, with it all stripped away, he had still been somewhat of an elitist bastard.

But there was a time for that, and now was not it. Lucius was proud in a quiet way, now - it was the sort of pride that took a man through years of horror and punishment, and helped him come out in the end. He had picked that up from Bella.

His guards noted his indifferent behaviour, but didn't care, and bound him with every counter spell available before he was to be moved up to the main floor, and then back down into the courtrooms. His guards - all twenty of them - led him through several darkened corridors and up flights of stairs, before emerging right into the main floor of the Ministry of Magic himself.

And that's where the photographers were waiting.

Lucius had expected them, but still, it amused him greatly. Yet it was also horribly depressing, so to make himself feel better he decided not to think too much on it.

He didn't have time to. After ten seconds, in which countless photos had been taken, an explosion rocked the building.

x

Usually big, violent things happen with some sort of warning. At least, that's what people like to think. They like to think that when they get on a plane there will be some engine trouble, but oh, no, it's fine now, and then the flight attendant looks a little shifty, but maybe it's her first day… and then the plane goes down, or the man sitting beside you puts a gun to your head and pulls the trigger.

There was no warning for the Ministry of Magic.

Something exploded on Level Seven. _Several _somethings exploded on Level Seven at the Ministry of Magic.

And that was that.


	13. xii

**I realise I am bombing the Ministry of Magic, shortly after, in real life, London was attacked. But I'm not going to change it, because, frankly, I had this all planned out months ago. I'm not being political. I am not smrt enough to be political. Christ.**

**This has also got to be the worst chapter in the story. It's not organised, it's just… augh. I wish I could just skip this part and go on. But I can't. Absolute shittage.**

XII

Tonks had gone out clubbing, and she was glad she did. She stumbled home at four in the morning, reeking of cigarette smoke. She could have brought someone along, but she had waved off his offer and had instead busied herself with ordering another round of drinks for the girls she'd just met. Tonks made friends very easily.

Her blonde hair stuck out in the back and fell in her eyes in the front. She collided with the doorframe in her kitchen, then sat down and went through a whole pack of cigarettes, and lots of water.

Later, sleepless, still smelling rather unwholesome and with red eyes, she went to Gringotts and made a withdrawal. A very big withdrawal, which she then transferred somewhere else.

She left feeling sad.

x

It was early in the morning when Remus finally found Mundungus' current place of residence.

Threats of what lay ahead seemed to be a theme when it came to Bellatrix's wild murders - with Kingsley it had been bloody footprints, but now it was Dung himself hanging out of his window.

Remus broke through the back door to get in and run up the flight of stairs. It was still early - maybe no one had seen the body yet. Besides that, it wasn't exactly in plain view. But he had to move quickly to make sure that stayed the case.

He had to kick open the door to Dung's flat - the trick was to put all of your force into the lock, just above the doorknob. Someone upstairs banged on the floor to get him to stop making such a racket at five in the morning.

Remus pushed the door closed behind him and hurried through the flat. Blood was splattered here and there - when he glanced into the kitchen he saw a liberal amount. But he was mostly concerned with the rope.

The room was cold and a little damp from the morning air. He heaved Mundungus' body up back through the window and letting him fall to the floor. Remus had never particularly liked him, but that wasn't the point. He had still been a member of the Order.

He didn't have very many wounds on him - just a few bruises. The blood spattered everywhere had to be Bella's.

Further inspection of the flat revealed that she had indeed gone through Mundungus' things, just as she had gone through Kingsley's. He found her blood in the bathroom, too. She hadn't bothered with a cleaning charm. He didn't know why.

But women of the Black family were funny like that.

Remus stood in the bathroom for a long time, thinking. _I__'m next_, were one of the things he thought.

He had never hated Bellatrix, but he had never liked her either. Again, he had admired her - but he wasn't the only one. Dozens of people had admired Bellatrix, with her courage and her stubborn resilience, and her beauty. She had dominated the Slytherin and Hufflepuff population of the school, the first years she had attended.

But when she turned fourteen, she took up with the company of Lucius Malfoy.

Not saying that she had become one of his cronies, or vice versa. Rather, Lucius and Bellatrix were like a group of schoolchildren all their own, practically removing themselves from the pecking order and acting on the outer edges, almost oblivious to the goings on of the school. They could be seen skipping meals to experiment on how fast certain objects would fall from the Astronomy Tower, or failing to show up to class because one of them was at the infirmary with some injury they had received pulling a stunt involving a suit of armour, or maybe a spear.

But whenever they spoke, people stopped to listen, or to listen while pretending to ignore them. When a Slytherin was pushed around by a Ravenclaw, Bellatrix struck hard and fast. If someone had trouble with their homework and asked for help, Lucius would probably do half of it.

Bellatrix and Lucius had been among the first of the Hogwarts graduates to be snapped up by the Dark Lord. They were the right sort of people, apparently. Careless, but smart; and strong, in body and mind. They were young and foolish. Remus, who had always felt old and sensible, had often looked at Bellatrix with a longing he couldn't describe.

That longing had stopped when she'd gone to Azkaban. But now it was starting to resurface, ever since he had killed her husband, and she had reacted in the midst of sadness and rage.

People like Bellatrix loved fiercely, in a way Remus never could. He wished he'd remembered his old admiration of her, and had remembered, way back to their schooldays, that when James pushed some Slytherin a year younger than he in the hall, so hard that the poor kid dropped all his books and broke a bottle of ink, Bellatrix had slapped James so hard that she'd been given a week of detention when McGonagall saw the bruise.

Bellatrix had accepted the detention with grace; ignored James's gloating and smiled, smugly, glad that her work there was done.

x

The morning grew late; at a little past nine, something blew up at the Ministry of Magic.

x

Severus answered the phone, even though he didn't want to. He wondered vaguely who it would be, calling to warn him of the news - not many wizards used phone lines.

"Severus!" He took a moment to try and place the voice. It was somewhat static and absolutely hysterical.

"Emmeline?"

"Get your ass to the Ministry now!" Emmeline Vance shrieked into the receiver. "There's been an explosion! Lucius Malfoy has escaped!"

She hung up. Whether by accident or on purpose, he wasn't sure.

"I know," Severus said quietly, staring at the phone, before setting it down and going to get dressed.

x

Severus hadn't done it, but he'd had a hand in it. He'd done his research, had crafted the spells, had given them to the Dark Lord. His contribution to free Lucius had been great.

This was because Severus owed Lucius. Severus was in debt to many, many people, and now he was starting to pay everything back. Hogwarts, The Order of the Phoenix, the Death Eaters, Lucius, Tonks. Severus was mathematical and scientific (as scientific as anyone who scorned the shaky and guesswork patterns of science, at least), and went through life yearning for some sort of homeostasis.

He was almost there. He had one more debt to repay, and then the scales would be even.

x

Tonks was asleep on her living room floor when she got the phone calls, two of them, one after another. She scrambled to get the first one, which was from her boss, and was too tired to fully comprehend what he was saying. The second was from Arthur Weasley, and she was awake enough by then to know what was going on, and that she had to come to the Ministry now.

After she had hung up on Arthur, her stomach churned, her head aches, and she had an urge to start crying. She phoned Severus, to tell him she loved him, and how she was thankful for all the times he'd let her hug him in public; because Severus was not an openly affectionate man and never had been. She sat on the phone, her heart beating like a panicked rabbit's.

He didn't answer. She wanted to put on her coat and go to his house. Instead she put on her coat, and she obeyed her summons.

x

Severus had showed up in a pair of pinstriped trousers and a black turtleneck. He stood in the rubble of the Ministry beside Moody. The structure of the building itself was unharmed, protected by magic centuries old, but everything else had taken quite a beating, especially Level Seven, where the explosion had taken place.

It had been planned - but then again, when Voldemort put forward attacks of such force, they were never random.

They'd been careful. The attackers hadn't set anything off on the main floor because they hadn't dared risk hurting Lucius. And Lucius had caught on quickly; by all reports he'd run for his life and disappeared for the Floo Network. They had tracked him to where he had gotten out - a wizarding pub up north - but he'd Apparated shortly after that.

"Muggle explosives," Moody said with a bit of a snort. People were everywhere, some looking for survivors, other keeping the inquisitive away, and fielding off reporters.

"But they're set off electrically," Severus pointed out. "So how is that possible?"

Moody shrugged. "They probably bound it with some sort of anti-magic protection and then covered it with a chameleon spell to protect that one. And the detonation must have caused that anti-magic spell to spread over a certain radius - that's how Lucius was able to escape. They hedged him very well magically, but he was practically free as a bird physically. In all probability, that's also the reason the damage was so great - magical protections to the building were down. The aurors were all over the place picking up atmosphere samples to see what the hell happened."

Severus snorted.

"It was probably a short period in which the magic was down, however," Moody continued. "Since he escaped through Floo. Where were you when this happened, anyway?"

"Stop implying it was me," Severus said.

"Well, I know it was," Moody said. That was when Hestia came up.

x

"They say it was a woman, but we don't know whether it was or not - anything's possible," Arthur was saying. "Anyway, this woman went right past Security, they didn't even notice her, and then she went through the entirety of Level Seven planting explosives in strategic places. And she left, probably about ten minutes before they escorted Malfoy up. No one saw because the reporters were all concentrating on getting a picture of Malfoy."

"So no picture of our assailant?" Moody asked.

It was ridiculous, and embarrassing. Even after the debacle with the Dark Lord weeks earlier, the Ministry of Magic's security seemed to be shaky and, at best, somewhat pathetic. But maybe, with the lack of activity in the darker scale of things (for, back in the old days, a Death eater attack was once every few days) the Ministry simply thought it had everything under control. But of course, those are damning last words.

"None." Arthur sighed. They had shifted out of the way of the various investigators. Most of the Order of the Phoenix was there, granted admission by members who were part of Magical Law Enforcement. There were other members of other organisations, too - and who knew, they probably overlapped each other. There could be Death Eaters present, masquerading as reporters, for all they knew. "And we know this wasn't a political attack, because it was in Level Seven and not, say, Level Five. It was all for Lucius."

Hestia swore. "This is mad," she said. "Any more leads?"

"We think it might have been Bellatrix." Arthur said. "She's the only viable suspect. It would be easy to change her face. She's very skilled."

"But she's been locked up in Azkaban for a decade," Severus said. "Her skills aren't as good as they might have been - her memory must surely be somewhat fried."

"Who gives a damn who did it, we know it was You Know Who in the end," Hestia said, "we have to concern ourselves with the wounded and the political ramifications. This is a national crisis."

"We know, Hestia," Severus said, "shut up."

"Severus," Arthur said, warningly. Severus looked round at the older man and stared, but said nothing more.


	14. xiii

XIII

Bellatrix reached out and touched the door handle. It was warm from the sunlight, and seemed to sing at the touch of her fingertips.

She withdrew, but only for a second - the next second she reached out, and grasped the handle, and turned it.

It opened quietly - no squeak, no rusty hinges, nothing. A well-used door. It shut quietly too.

It was so familiar. A piece of her childhood used to support the organisation that wanted her dead. Bile rose in her throat, but she was accustomed to it.

The hallway was very dark. She breathed in the cool air and looked around. The place was clean, but still smelt faintly musty. She went to grab her wand but stopped midway, hesitant, listening closely. Was something watching her?

No. No one was watching her.

She moved forward and began to ascend the stairs. She had a job to do, and not long to do it. Upstairs was where the passages ran down into the cellars, and those dark connections between rooms. Bella had always refused to take any room other than the one near the back and to the left, because it housed the passageway that could bring her to Sirius'. He'd been her best friend before school had started.

She passed the portraits lining the stairway and down the hall. She didn't dare pull the musty velvet curtains back to see what lay behind them. Especially not her aunt's.

Her aunt had been a woman of great vanity - she had the right, for she had been dark-haired and lovely, but in a way unlike Bella or Sirius, who took after their fathers. Sirius' mother had been very beautiful in an aching, poetic way, and she knew it; she'd had her portrait painted, and she'd instilled within it the magical ability to appear just as she was, right at that moment - as if to prove to anyone that in sleeping or in waking, the Lady Black was still the prettiest thing that could be seen.

And of course, as she'd slowly gone crazy, and had aged, and died, alone, in her house, without her husband or her two little boys, the portrait had gone along with her.

It reminded Bella of Dorian Gray.

She peeked into one room - Regulus' old room, she realised. She remembered everything now. She crept in quietly. The floor was bare - no books, no toys, no broomstick.

"Bella," a voice said.

Bella's heart jumped in her throat and she whipped around towards the doorway, her wand drawn, her free hand clutching at her knife. There was no one there and nothing apparent - except for a thin sniggering in the air.

Bellatrix paused. She turned towards the wall, where the sound was emanating - a portrait.

"Grandfather," she said, dryly. Not her _grandfather_, of course - far older than that - but she didn't feel like counting generations.

"Still spry, Bellatrix," Phineas Nigellus said, sounding smug. "Just like your father. He was quite an uppity lad, though. Whatever are you doing here? You're not allowed, you know."

"I am a Black," Bellatrix said. "I have a right to be here."

A portrait was never the person himself, but still, it held many of the same characteristics. Phineas was a proud man, and he was proud of his family, whom he considered far beyond noble. He still had to clear a few things up before Bella could walk free.

"You married a Frenchman." Phineas said.

"I loved him."

"He was French. You're English."

"He was an Englishman, his family left France with the émigrés."

Phineas smiled dryly. "I should, by rights, inform Dumbledore that you are here."

"But you won't," Bellatrix pointed out. "Because I am family, and family rules over what may be right."

"Right you are, my darling girl," Phineas said, "though I may remind you, you did kill your cousin."

"It was me or him," Bellatrix said.

"I know," Phineas agreed softly, "that is why I am going to tell you that _someone else is in this house_. Be quick."

Bellatrix froze. Outside the room, down the hallway and the stairs, the front door was closing.

x

She scooted down the hallway, heart beating in her throat. She couldn't bear to think of what might have happened if Phineas hadn't warned her - had let her converse with him and covered up the sound of the closing door, or had not spoken to her at all and she, lost in her work, may have noticed nothing.

If she was caught, she was dead. She knew this.

She listened carefully. Someone was coming up - but only one. One person. She could deal with that - unless it was Dumbledore.

She peeked down the stairs, and froze, because Remus Lupin was looking right up at her, halfway up the staircase - perhaps thinking, before she had revealed herself, that she was a friend, perhaps ready to say a greeting.

He said, "Bellatrix?"

And all along the hallway curtains flew aside, and portraits woke up, and started shouting, and her crazy aunt shrieked "Bellatrix! BELLATRIX!" and the whole house vibrated with their echoes.

x

Remus didn't expect it. He should have. It was a crazy manoeuvre, and Bellatrix was crazy.

She crashed right into him, and he fell - they both fell - down the stairs, tumbling, elbows and knees and heads cracking against the wall or the staircase or sometimes each other.

He supposed it was a lucky thing they she weighed just as much of him - well, he was a little heavier, which was part of how he managed to land on top of her when they hit the floor. The portraits were shrieking her name, over and over; it was surreal, and disturbing.

She punched him in the throat and dragged herself away, clutching at her wand with her other hand. She didn't turn to face him, just ran.

Remus, swallowing and gasping, pulled himself to his feet to give chase.

x

Pyrites lit up a cigarette in the kitchen.

It was an uncomfortable atmosphere. Lucius had never liked Pyrites; Pyrites had never liked Lucius. Physically, of course, Pyrites was far more lovely than the Malfoy could ever hope to be; but, unfortunately, Pyrites hadn't the ability to use it. Lucius could smile at a woman, and she'd fall for him, and that would be that. Pyrites had a much more difficult time with it.

And while Lucius was not exactly young, Pyrites was far older. No one knew how old he was. Voldemort had once mentioned how, at one point, Pyrites had collaborated with Nicholas Flamel. And Flamel had been an old man. So Pyrites, as a result, tended to talk down to people who didn't appreciate it - in other words, Lucius.

"So the woman with the bombs," Pyrites was saying, "That was your wife? Pretty gutsy. Obviously a Black."

Lucius gave Pyrites A Look. Then he stood up and left the room.

"Bloody aristocrats," Pyrites said, rolling his eyes. They all acted the same. Poncy. Bellatrix was different; she acted like a woman, and wasn't afraid to admit it, but she was one of the few of the purebloods that didn't put on such airs.

Voldemort came in, wearing a black sweater with the hood up. He sat down across from Pyrites, in Lucius' vacated spot, and fastened his eyes on the ceiling.

Five minutes later, Voldemort said, "Put that cigarette out."

The unsaid words were, _before I do something rather violent to your face_, but the thing about Voldemort was that he never needed to say those things. It was crude and overdone. People knew he would do something bad anyway. So you just did what he said.

Pyrites hurriedly crushed the cigarette out on the kitchen table.

x

In the meantime, Remus had his ear pressed to the wall, listening.

She was there. She had to be. Where else could she have possibly gone?

Down the hallway Bellatrix had gone, like some mad march hare on the run. And then she'd gone. Hadn't Sirius told him, years ago, about all the passages that riddled the House of Black, and that was how he was able to get away from things, night after night, during the summer holidays?

(Of course, Regulus would find him sometimes, but Sirius would scare him away).

Remus was confused as to why she wasn't just trying to up and kill him. He'd killed her husband, after all. Surely she knew that by now.

Perhaps she was playing with him.

What Remus didn't know was that Bella had a job to do.

x

The passage was musty, and when she inhaled she nearly tore into a fit of coughing. She muffled herself as best she could, squeezing her eyes shut to protect them from the dust.

There was a wolf down the hallway. She could sense him, prowling across the entrance. Maybe he would get her. Maybe he wouldn't.

But she had a job to do.

She dared not blunder her way in the dark - childhood memories could not help her, no recall of a passage's state could fend off anything dark and unsavoury that had decided to make the place its home.

She whispered lumos, and made her way through.

Nothing bothered Bella. Perhaps it was because she had an ancestral right to be there, as she had told Phineas. Or perhaps there was nothing in there anyway.

She came out at the kitchen, as silently as she could. The portraits had stopped shrieking, now; their echoes had dimmed, and the house was quiet.

The kitchen looked as if it had been left suddenly, without warning - no doubt it had. There was some cutlery on the counters, and a glass of water on the table. There were some documents on the table as well - but nothing that interesting. Nothing the Death Eaters didn't know. She folded them up and tucked them into her sweater, anyway. She should have brought some sort of shoulder bag.

She listened. No werewolf.

She knew Remus Lupin from her school days - the quiet one. The one that did nothing when someone was getting hit right in front of him. She hadn't much appreciated that sort of person, until she'd met Rodolphus, who had been very similar in manner. She liked Rodolphus, who was quiet, and smiled a lot. In fact, she'd even loved him. It had been liberating.

Bellatrix crept back into the passageway and shut the door behind her.

x

Voldemort was wandering through the house, restlessly, ducking into every room, looking beneath every bed and peeking in every closet. He finally settled down when he walked into Bella's room, moving across the chamber to open the window and stick his head out, bathing his face in sunlight.

"My lord?" Lucius asked, from where he was sitting on the bed. Lucius, of all the Death Eaters, was the most beaten. He asked questions - many, many questions - and, often, Voldemort ended up hitting Lucius because of it. Lucius never seemed to learn from this. "May I be so bold as to inquire as to what, exactly, you are doing?"

"You're always bold," Voldemort said, drawing a deep breath of warm, noon air. "That is why I keep you around."

"I see."

"Curious thing," Voldemort continued, absent-mindedly. Voldemort had a penchant for talking, about anything and everything; and this was infuriating, because no matter how much Voldemort talked, most people had no inkling of what he was really saying. "I once encountered a cobra in my travels. A very impressive snake - when it rears in warning, it can reach the height of a man. And it usually only rears when its young are in danger."  
"Is that so, my lord."  
"That is so," Voldemort said, looking over his shoulder at Lucius and his white-gold hair. "And I say it is curious because that particular type of cobra has a very interesting habit of sharing living quarters with its prey. Isn't that odd, Lucius?"

"Very."

"Yes," Voldemort said, turning back to the open window, inspecting a tree with interest. "That's what I thought."

x

Nobody ever knew just what Voldemort was talking about. Some probably thought they did - like Dumbledore, maybe - but that was foolish thinking and, in many cases, pure arrogance.

There had been one girl, who had known exactly what Voldemort was talking about. He'd met her in Sicily forty or so years ago. He'd killed her, in the end, because that's what Voldemort did. He killed people.


	15. xiv

**in which strange things happen.**

XIV

Bellatrix avoided him.

She knew he wouldn't leave - he couldn't, not without leaving her alone with what could be dozens of informative documents she could plunder for her master's cause. And there was no one to contact for help. Lupin was on his own.

But there was something strange going on, she realised. It hit her strongly as she moved through a corridor, behind the sitting room wall, and suddenly, for no reason, she couldn't breathe.

The darkness crawled through her nostrils and mouth and squirmed in her lungs, clawed at her stomach. Her body seized up, and then it was wracked by coughs, and dust was everywhere, in her eyes and ears and even between her teeth. She dropped her wand.

The house heaved, and she struck the wall of the corridor. Little stars of pulsing light burst in her vision. The papers she'd managed to steal - the ones from the kitchen, and more she'd found stashed in an old wardrobe - crinkled loudly beneath her sweater, as if trying to get free.

_I am a Black_, she thought. _This is my house_.

She clawed at the walls, blind, and suffocating.

x

There was something strange going on.

Remus tensed, and listened, his heart beating a frantic pace. The walls were creaking - the whole _house _was creaking, as if it were alive. Maybe it was.

A sudden movement made him whip around, but it was only Kreacher - the thin, scrawny, decrepit house elf. He shifted into view, giving Remus a baleful glare with watery eyes.

Remus said nothing.

Kreacher said, "The Noble House of Black-"

x

He was your husband and you loved him.

x

The wall exploded outwards.

No, not exploded, Remus realised - but a door, a hidden door, was thrown wide, and out toppled Bellatrix, covered in dirt, her face streaked wet with grime where the dust had met her sweat.

She gasped and dragged herself upright, her hair in her face. She looked around, terrified - _but she can't see_, Remus saw now, noticing how Bella's eyes were caked with blood - before she began to claw, desperately, at the clotted material clinging to her sockets.

Remus didn't move. He knew he should have. Just strike her down - she was in the perfect position, the perfect range. But he couldn't. The house shuddered, with great effort. Bella's wand rolled towards Remus, and stopped at his feet.

Maybe he was in shock. He wasn't sure. It certainly was… a strange thing to see. Bellatrix Lestrange, her eyes caked with blood. He noticed, too, that what he had taken for as a cloud of dust was actually steam, rising from her shoulders and back and hair, as if she were giving off a great heat.

Kreacher said from behind Remus, in his reedy voice, "She killed the worthless son - and she is the Dark Lord's favourite, yes. But the Noble House of Black… is _angry_…oh. Yes."

Bellatrix spat and Remus realised she was spitting blood. It was on her lips of dripping down her chin, too, as she coughed. He half-wondered whether she'd spew up her guts, or something equally gory like that, the sort of thing Remus would see in muggle horror flicks.

Then she cracked open her eyes, and stared at him. Bits of clotted blood were lodged beneath her fingernails, and her skin was an angry red from where she had scratched. But there was no blood caked on her face anymore. It had gone.

Then she bent over, retching, and coughed up more blood.

x

Voldemort would sometimes say, "Honour is something created to make men feel better about themselves."

But not everyone is so cynical. And the Noble House of Black _is _noble - so very, very noble. You have a duty to your family, the house whispered into Bellatrix's head. When you married… you inherited… the duties of a wife. When you married Rodolphus… you promised him love… and devotion and you… will not forsake the ties… of the handfast…

He killed your husband and he's been there all along and you didn't even touch him in anger. Be on your way; the Noble House of Black has no use of your kind. Sinner. Harpy. Liar.

Bellatrix's vision swam and then cleared. Blood was spattered on the floor. She put her hand to her mouth, tasting it now, coating her mouth and teeth and tongue. The blood of a Black - the blood of the truly noble. Splattered all along the floor.

She looked back up at Remus. He wordlessly kicked the wand towards her. Its roll was dreadfully slow to her blurry mind.

She was doing something wrong. But what?

"Why did you do it?" She whispered, hoarsely, to Remus.

"Because you killed the man I loved," Remus said, levelling his wand at Bella. Why didn't she pick hers up? "So I killed yours."

Bellatrix closed her eyes. She felt dizzy.

"No," she finally said. "I did the right thing, then… Sirius, Sirius left his brother to die… Sirius deserved to die as well. The House was not angry at him for leaving Regulus… but the House is not angry at me for killing him, either…"

"You're mad," Remus said abruptly.

She heard that a lot, so she didn't take notice. She focused on not falling over as she bent to pick up the wand.

As her fingers closed around it, the House belted out a scream. She let go and clapped her hands over her ears in agony; Remus looked at her in absolute confusion.

_He can't hear what I hear_, she realised. Of course. He's impure. He's a werewolf. Chattel.

Don't be a fool, Bellatrix, the House spat. Bellatrix of the ivory skin and the lily dresses, playing with Sirius in the backyard, back when the only thing she had to fight for was her family. There's much more to fight for, now; but that doesn't make family any less important.

She gently removed her hands.

"Why was it assigned to _you_?" She asked carefully. "I never took you for a hit man, Remus."

Remus' grip on his weapon tightened slightly. "It was either me or Severus; and Severus didn't have the courage."

Bellatrix bent down and picked up her wand. The House didn't scream this time. But something else did - high in the rooms above them, an inhuman whinny.

Remus made the mistake of looking up in consternation. And when he looked back down, Bellatrix was tearing down the hall towards the front door.

x

When Tonks finally showed up, no one was very happy with her. But that was fine; Tonks wasn't very happy with herself either. She picked a bad time to get drunk.

When she asked, she discovered Severus had been there, but had also just left. This made her feel incredibly sad. It was a deep, aching kind of sadness, the sadness people tend to feel when they got older and realised, with a pang, that they can never be children ever again.

But this was worse.

She was unhappy for a long time, kicking around the Ministry and doing what people told her to do. Dumbledore saw her, and he was a smart man, and he started to figure everything out.

x

Voldemort up and left, without a word.

And while Voldemort often did things without saying them, this time it was truly puzzling, for there had been no warning, no hints weeks beforehand. This was spur of the moment, and because of that it was unnerving.

Voldemort zipped up his sweater and went outside and walked off down the street. There was a bad feeling in his chest, like a tumour. It told him something bad was going to happen, and that he ought to do something about it.


	16. xv

XV

Bellatrix had gone.

Remus went upstairs, and saw Buckbeak, Sirius' hippogriff, still squealing in pain. Remus suspected Kreacher, but the house elf was nowhere in sight.

Remus stepped over and patted the hippogriff's beak, soothingly.

x

Bellatrix wanted to phone Voldemort, but didn't. Instead she made her way to her car, and she drove away. She was covered in dirt and, in some cases, her own blood. Or had it been someone else's blood? The thought made her gag.

Houses - especially old houses - were the creepiest things Bella had ever, in her life, encountered. Even Malfoy Manor made her shiver. She could never understand how Narcissa could live in it.

She felt miserable, because Severus had betrayed her. And he'd even given her a lead on the case - perhaps he had realised right after that he had done a stupid thing, and that Bellatrix would see this through, to the end, all the way back to Severus.

"You helped with the arrangements to kill my husband and you didn't even stop them," Bella said to her windshield as she drove, with a sigh. "You bloody bastard."

She wished that Severus had had the guts to kill Rodolphus himself, and not to have delegated it to Remus. It would have made Bellatrix feel a lot better about killing Severus if he'd had had more of a hand in it.

x

So she was waiting for him when he came home.

There was dried blood down her front from when she'd vomited it up. Her hair stuck up in strange places, and she was covered in dust.

"You're such an asshole," She said from where she was sitting at the dining room table. On the tabletop before her was a gun, black and dull and menacing, even though it was unloaded, the cartridges laying next to it.

Severus dropped into the seat across from her, looking tired.

"I don't feel like explaining," he said.

Bellatrix stared at him, and then stared at the gun.

"Alright," she said. She had a good idea, anyway. They called Bella crazy, but she wasn't the worst, just more obvious.

For Severus was excitable, antisocial, and in serious need of counselling sessions concerning the area of anger management. He was a borderline sociopath and had random fits of anxiety when overwhelmed by a feeling that he was going to die, even though there were no grounds for that sort of emotion. He was also obsessive compulsive.

Severus liked things even.

Bellatrix stood up, and she took the gun with her, along with the ammunition. She motioned for him to push his chair back from the table, and he did. She sat in his lap, matter-of-factly, straddling him, and began to load the gun.

"I don't think I can do it," she said while she worked.

"I'm not doing it myself," Severus said, firmly.

Bellatrix looked at Severus, raising one thin eyebrow. "Why? Are you afraid there might be a Hell after all? You're not a very good atheist if you're not even sure, Severus."

He shrugged. "I don't want to take the chance."

"Fine," Bella said, cocking the gun in a sharp, cold motion.

They stared at each other for a very, very long time.

Then Bella said, softly, "Open your mouth, Severus," so softly that he almost didn't hear her. Except he did.

x

The gun's kick shocked her, sent her hand jarring back, as damning as the sound of the gunshot itself.

She should have kept hold of the gun and bought it with her. Instead she dropped it, trying her best not to scream - though in horror or anguish or something else entirely, Bella herself wasn't sure - and scrambled off of Severus, before the blood began to pool beneath the chair, careful not to knock anything over, and tripping through the sitting room to get out the back door and flee, because she'd parked her car at the end of the street and didn't want anyone to see her running. She didn't want to see anyone while she ran, either.

There seemed to be no disturbance in the neighbourhood. Some protection that Severus had put up - protections that Bellatrix had managed to bypass (and this sort of thing she was starting to do, her ability to walk through wards, was frightening her along with everything else, away in the back of her mind) - had blocked the sound of the gunshot from reaching the ears of anyone outside the house.

Bellatrix ran, and tripped, and collided with someone.

She apologized, pulling away and starting to run around, hoping it wasn't a wizard. But it was.

More accurately, it was Dumbledore.

He seized her wrist, and Bella found herself halted, unable to take another step without wrenching her arm. How could an old man be so strong? She threw herself away, pulling and tugging and straining, and still Albus Dumbledore did not let go.

Voldemort was standing at the mouth of the alley. He looked angry.


	17. xvi

XVI

"Do let go of her, Dumbledore," Voldemort said. His voice was soft, but harsh, like the purr of a wild cat.

Bellatrix shrieked, "Master!" And tried to tear herself away until she felt her socket pop a little in protest. He was here, her lord was here, and he would save her. Wouldn't he? Yes, of course he would.

"She's a murderer, Tom," Dumbledore said calmly, "As are you. She must be brought to justice."

"It's not about Bellatrix," Voldemort said, "this is, pardon the cliché, just between you and me. You want to take her away from me. I won't have it."

Bellatrix was still screaming, and she was starting to cry, too, feeling despairing, and frightened, and panicked. Bella had just killed the boy she'd known since she was seven by making him swallow a bullet, and her mind was numbed by this fact.

She hoped that no one could hear her screaming and making this fuss - she didn't want any muggles involved in this. At all. But she couldn't, just couldn't stop.

Voldemort said, "Be quiet, Bella."  
And Bella fell silent.

"Strange, her devotion to you," Dumbledore said. "You lie to her, but still she obeys."

Bellatrix whipped around to look at her old Headmaster, furious. She opened her mouth to shout at him, but then closed her mouth with an audible click of her teeth. She didn't feel like justifying something so ludicrous with an answer.

Dumbledore continued. "You're a halfblood, Tom. Why didn't you tell her?"

Voldemort glared.

"Liar," Bella spat at Dumbledore, once again trying to wrench herself free, unable to stand the touch, unable to abide the closeness.

"It's true," Voldemort said, immediately, quietly, a little apologetic. "I never mentioned it before, as it never really cropped up in conversation."

Bellatrix paused. Dumbledore let her go, and she didn't run away.

Voldemort said, "Half and half, genetically. My mother was the purest of all blood, and a daughter of the Slytherin line; my father was a wealthy muggle named Tom Riddle. She died shortly after giving birth to me, gave me my father's name. My father wouldn't take me in, and so I spent my first decade of life in an orphanage, along with the next six or so summers while I went through my courses at Hogwarts. I killed my father and his parents when I was seventeen. My father lied to my mother. It was a bad thing to do."

He paused there, feeling that was explanation enough. Bellatrix turned to stare at Dumbledore with wide, deer-caught-in-headlights eyes.

Dumbledore smiled faintly at Voldemort, and raised his wand. Voldemort reached for his. "You see, Tom, no matter what you do, things will always fall apart around you. They say evil contains the seeds of its own destruction-"

Bellatrix sprinted away from Dumbledore, threw herself at Voldemort with force, her arms going around his neck. Voldemort nearly toppled over but caught himself, and held on to Bellatrix, hanging tense and wary in his arms, her tears running down her cheeks.

There was a pause.

Then, almost experimentally, Voldemort pushed Bella away; surprised, she fell to the pavement with a thud that must have stung. But then she leapt back up again, facing him down.

Voldemort said, quietly, "Get out of the way, Bella."

Bella said, stubbornly, "No."

Voldemort peeked around her to look at Dumbledore. "Not to be childish," he said, "but you must admit, there's a certain irony in all this. I hope you see what she's doing."

Bellatrix turned on her heel to face Dumbledore, backing up until she was pressed to Voldemort's chest, doing her best to shield him as much as possible.

"He's a halfblood," Dumbledore said, frowning.

Bellatrix blinked at Dumbledore, politely puzzled at his reasoning.

One of the reasons Voldemort treasured Bella so dearly was because whatever he said, she believed. And that was why he did not lie to her - merely failed to mention things, for her head was still uncharted territory, and he dared not lose her. He didn't know how far gone her devotion was.

Voldemort felt a flare of golden, glorious, strong, empowering triumph.

"I told you she loved me," Voldemort said, his arms going around Bella's waist. "Keep your hands off what is mine, Dumbledore."

They were gone in a burst of flame.


	18. xvii

**I FINISHED IT.**

**And lo and behold the crapsome ending. I never could get them right.**

**Will now go and wait around the bookstore till midnight for High Blood Pressure. Good day to you.**

XVII

"Direct orders from Dumbledore," Arthur said, briskly, to the goblins. With him were a dozen people - members of the Order and ministry officials and a scattering of other blood. "Severus Snape was a professor of Hogwarts and a member of the Order of the Phoenix. His vault is to be drained in order to fund the war against You Know Who. It's what he would have wanted."

The goblin looked Arthur squarely in the eye. "His vault has already been emptied."

There was a pause.

"What?" Arthur said, finally. "Who? Severus emptied it before he died?"

"No," the goblin said. Most goblins tended not to elaborate on many things, since they mostly felt irritation towards the wizarding population in general. But this was genuinely amusing to him. "A young woman did. Just a few days ago."

"Who?"

"I didn't ask," the goblin said, mildly. "She had the key. That's all Gringotts needs. A key."

x

Bellatrix woke up, slowly, in her bed. She vaguely remembered the backseat of her car, and Voldemort driving, but she didn't remember being brought up a flight of stairs, or anything else.

Lucius was sitting on the edge of the bed.

He was an angel. He bent over her, hair falling around his face like a golden halo, tickling her nose. She sneezed; he withdrew, trying to look disgusted, but was too amused.

"You killed Severus," he said. "That's a shame."

"He wanted it," Bellatrix mumbled fuzzily.

Lucius tipped his head to the side, looking down at her; mastering with such ease the aristocratic grace of the purely born and the wealthy. The only grace that Bellatrix had ever managed to master was the flight of a running fawn.

But there was a beauty in that, too, just as there was beauty in a cobra protecting its young.

"He wanted it?" he asked.

"Yes," Bellatrix said, "he did."

She rolled over, her back to Lucius, but she did not want him to go away. He didn't.

x

Tonks was vomiting in the toilet. Her hair was spiky and black.

She could not tamp down the nausea in her.

She had been Severus' closest relative, at least, the closest relative he would ever actually acknowledge. She was his goddaughter. She had said no, when asked about whether or not there would be a funeral. The only people that would want to show up would be the people who were currently wanted for high treason.

Just bury him quietly, she'd told the undertaker. He wouldn't want a ceremony anyway. He'd roll his eyes. And he'd wanted to go, too.

All around Tonks' flat were her belongings, scattered everywhere, most waiting to be packed up but some already on its way - her life boxed up in brown, puke-ish coloured cardboard. She was moving out - Severus had named her in his will. She was to inherit the house with the strange memories and the odd belongings that held so many clues to the past of a man she loved but had never really understood.

Well, now she was going to start.

Tonks flushed the toilet, and washed the sweat from her face. Then she went back to packing.

x

'Nothing can stop me now;  
Nothing can stop me now;  
Nothing can stop me now;  
Nothing…  
Can stop me.'  
--_Piggy_, Nine Inch Nails


End file.
